Is Google Making Us Stupid?

“I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Carr opens his essay with a personal anecdote regarding the shift in his manner of thinking and the quality of his intellectual engagement with texts. He contrasts his newly-truncated attention span against the way he used to process texts at a more leisurely pace and with greater subtlety. Carr’s choice to begin with a personal anecdote rather than hard-hitting data makes his essay more immediately relatable. It invites readers to examine their own intellectual life for similarities with Carr’s—and Carr banks on the proliferation and relatability of experiences like his to hook his reader. If he ingratiates himself to the reader with a point of shared experience, he can more effectively mount his argument.

“As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Here, Carr begins interweaving his personal experience with a form of expert testimony: the assertions of the respected media theorist Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan’s cited assertions match up with Carr’s personal experience: As Carr’s consumption of Internet media has increased, it’s also begun to shape his process of thought, making it more clipped, less sensitive to subtlety, and more condensed and compressed. Here, Carr is essentially repeating the thought that he opened the essay with—but giving it more weight as he introduces quotes from respected scholars, theorists, and scientists that support his arguments.