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Critical Essay 'Is Google Making USupid?'

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A rapid surge of innovation within the past several years has allowed us to synthesize the renowned global communication network known as the Internet. This immense network is comprised of billions of webpages, several search engines, and of course, malicious content and scams. Although the Internet was inaccessible to majority of the people in the past, it is estimated that there are over 3 billion internet users in the world. This accounts for over 40% of the world population! However, with such frequent usage and advancements in technology, hindrances are inevitable and bound to occur. In his critical essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Carr asserts that common users are blinded from the detrimental effects of search engines such as Google. …show more content…

It has come to a point where people are so lazy and do not have the capacity to think of their own ideas or comprehend properly so they turn to the Internet to solve their problems. For example, many people are not able to solve intricate math problems so they enter the problem into some online calculator which solves the question; the student just completed a problem that would take a couple minutes to solve in less than 5 seconds without any work. Another general trend that Carr and many other Google (and other search engine) users are beginning to discover is that they are becoming reliant on it’s artificial intelligence. It’s up to a point that we rely on the Internet’s quick result that, “it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence” (Carr). He then highlighted a quote from Richard Foreman’s recent essay. He starts by saying that he comes from a tradition of Western culture where, “a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West” (Carr) and continues saying that we no longer are like that and this is a result of technology. Now, everyone does not carry the distinguishing personality inside of them because the Internet and Google has made everyone less original. Unlike how many people were able to draw their own conclusions and make inferences while reading books, the ability to think creatively and critically has drifted away. Essentially, Google being able to draw conclusions and think of new ideas for us has led us to limit our mental capacity in terms of creativity and

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