Is Google Making Us Stupid?

The essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was written by Nicholas Carr. It was originally published in The Atlantic’s July/August 2008 issue. The essay stirred much debate, and in 2010, Carr published an extended version of the essay in book form, entitled The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

The essay begins and ends with an allusion to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the initial allusion, Carr summarizes the moment toward the end of the film in which “the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene [...] Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial ‘brain.’ ‘Dave, my mind is going,’ HAL says, forlornly. ‘I can feel it. I can feel it.’” (1). Carr uses this allusion to assert that he, like HAL, has had a growing feeling that “someone, or something, has been tinkering with [his] brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory” (2). He feels that his brain has changed the way it processes information and thinks. He finds it increasingly more difficult to read deeply and with subtlety, as he loses his concentration and gets distracted and restless while reading.