Carr/"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Not a bad question. And certainly, there is some truth in "the internet is sucking my brain out." But I'm leaning more towards the development of ADD, than actual brain loss. And Carr's point is that he believes that his THINKING is CHANGING, rather than his BRAIN DISINTEGRATING. Maybe he means that he is losing the ability to think at all, with information to be found everywhere, with little effort. Are we becoming robotic, as he suggests? Desensitized, sure, but robotic? I'm not so sure. We simply get used to ideas, things, events, and then expect them to occur, or appear. Just because we get most information from a machine doesn't mean we're becoming them. What makes this information (or our intelligence) artificial is not how we get it, but that we don't know where it comes from. Anyone can add or delete or create info. We can't ever really know what is true.

As for people's inability to concentrate on long pieces of writing, I do not agree at all with Carr. I spend a lot of time on the computer, but what I do is read. What I read is called fanfiction--fiction based on characters from already-created shows, movies, books, video games (I don't understand that one...) and other things where a universe is created, with characters. These pieces of writing can be extremely long, almost novel-like, or very short. They are presented in chapters if they are long enough. Many of my favorite fanfictions are long ones. So although I do not read novels as much as I want to, I feel that the amount of these stories I read compensate for it. I'm still reading well-written works.

Carr argues that if something is too long, he will not be able to concentrate on reading it. This happens to everyone. If something is not interesting to a person, they will not continue with it. Or, for those who claim they cannot read a favorite novel ("I can't read War and Peace anymore" says Bruce Friedman), perhaps they have read it too many times. If this post is boring to someone, I don't expect them to read it. If they've already read it, I don't expect them to read it again. I do believe that computers make us lazy. Google makes us lazy. Not stupid.