Thursday, November 12, 2015

Response to "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"










Google Analysis
Joseph Stay
Brigham Young University-Idaho














Abstract
In “Google Analysis,” Joseph Stay—student at Brigham Young University-Idaho—examines the use of Nicholas Carr’s use of ethos, pathos, and logos in his essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  He extracts specific quotes and strategies from the text that Carr uses to prove his point and answer the question explicitly stated in his essay’s title, and analyzes the strategy used in each section to conclude whether or not it is a useful ploy in getting his point across.













Google Analysis
            In the early Christian era, an apostle wrote “a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.”  (James 1:7, Bible) Now whether or not scriptural application can also be geared toward a scholastic analysis is, of course, subjective, but the principle holds some merit.  When making an argument, one takes a stand on either the right or the left.  Of course, this does not mean that the other side is to be completely ignored or invalidated.  A good argument consists of a conscious recognition of the other side’s opinion and respect toward said opinion.  Perhaps in this sense the condemnation of a “double mind” does not mean we are to be ignorant of an opposing view, but steadfast in our own while considering the points made by the other.
            Nicholas Carr, in his contemplative essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” makes it very clear the point he is trying to get across.  Through the use of statistics, anecdotes, examples from popular culture, and quotes, he examines this new phenomenon that has gripped the 21st century world which is the Internet search engine “Google.”  While all these methods are vessels, the real argumentative strategies are found in his use of ethos, pathos, and logos.  I found, overall, his use of these methods to be instrumental in creating a well thought-out, observational essay that helps the readers to liken themselves to what is being said and to self-examine oneself.  However, there were also some faults in Carr’s logic that—despite my desire to not be critical of an essay that to me caused me to reflect on my own use of the media—I wish to examine in the hopes that both a writer will not fall into these traps and a reader will not be tricked into thinking any certain way.
Ethos
The ethos strategy used in this essay—that is, Carr’s maneuver in appealing to the general morals and values of his audience—are well in play.  As his essay focuses on the specific habits of our culture in using the Internet to “power brose horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins…(going) online to avoid reading in the traditional sense” (Carr, p. 2) one might argue that the whole entirety of his essay is written with ethos in mind, trying to play to our new set of values and what is versus what culture used to be.  To state it more explicitly, Carr himself explains the following in establishing a premise for his essay:
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.  But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. (Carr, p. 2)
This statement plays to our sense of culture as well as to what we as a majority do to not only communicate but also get our information.  The widespread use of both the Internet and cellular devices in our culture help us to realize what Carr is saying, especially to the newer generations.  Those slightly older will be able to identify with the statement he made regarding television being the medium of choice in the 1970s and 1980s.  He also plays us up, helping us realize that indeed we may be reading more than we did before, which is different than perhaps other commentators’ statements regarding this generation.  Carr then clarifies that the point he is making is that the reading is different than it used to be, that perhaps the amount of reading is not negatively affected, but the way we interpret the content, and the way we internalize what we read through the media.
            This begs the question of what Carr was referring to in the very title of his essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  I would suggest that in this method, Carr, though perhaps trying to make a point with his use of the word “stupid,” misled his audience into thinking that he indeed was also one of those commentators that condemns the use of the Internet in these times.  Admittedly, that is what I thought he was getting at when I first examined and thumbed through the essay; it took a deep-reading and annotation to realize that there was something more to his purpose.  In this aspect of using the ethos, Carr was misleading and it was upon his own image that the negativity was reflected.
Pathos
            Carr, like any good argumentative or persuasive writer, attempts and succeeds in playing to the emotions of the reader.  This strategy hits home to the way the other mode of persuasion ethos works, as our personal emotions often go hand-in-hand with the way our cultural morals and standards are organized.  Carr uses a different approach however, and validates his own use of the pathos in the following reference to a quote given by Google co-creator Sergey Brin:  “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”  In response to this startling statement made by Brin and quoted by Carr, Carr himself adds: 
“Their easy assumption that we’d all be ‘be better off’ if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling…the human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.”  (Carr, p. 6)
Carr does a good job in his own stance on the issue in this point, noting that the quote given by one of Google’s creators is unsettling to him.  The worry I have with Carr’s use of pathos here is that he proceeds to lose the impact in a steady stream of logos, which I will discuss further in the next section; but for the sake of this context, I will give the example from the text.  A few paragraphs down from his last statement, after indeed a short amount of time building on this “unsettling” issue, Carr redirects his pathos-driven argument into a logical analysis regarding “the arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century.” (Carr, p. 6)
            Before we get too far into the logos of Carr’s essay, however, there was another method that Carr employed that worried me somewhat, that was “unsettling” to me in a word.  In the midst of the previously mentioned argument of Carr’s pathos leading into logos, he throws in the small yet significant statement “Maybe I’m just a worrywart.” (Carr, p. 6)  Perhaps this is where we may return to examine the introductory statement made by the early Christian apostle.  Carr is making a rather compelling argument, and could have given his point of view with precision and confidence had he not included this footnote.
It does, in fact, open an issue of criticism.  If he notes that he is indeed perhaps only being a “worrywart,” one might assume that he would follow that up with some evidence to the contrary of what he is stating.  Instead of examining the other side of the argument, however, he continues with “Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine.” (Carr, p. 6)  Without missing a beat, he is back into his own argument and his own point of view.  To me, above all, this was the most evident fallacy in Carr’s argument.
This also wasn’t the only instance of this type of fallacy.  He gets his own foot in the door of his argument—not a bad thing in analyzing both sides of the argument—when he makes the statement, following a series of anecdotes reinforcing his thesis, “Anecdotes alone don’t prove much.” (Carr, p. 2)  However, instead of allowing, at least for a moment so as not to stray from his momentum, the reader to accept that a few anecdotes from the lives of his own friends and colleagues do not necessarily reflect the attitude of position of all literary buffs, which the subjects of his anecdotes are, he swings back into the essay as he does in the previous case.  He follows this statement with a brief, hopeful sentence of how research on Internet effects on cognition are yet to come, as if to validate his point, and then back into his argument.  If anything, it works as a good transition, but with the reader feeling hanging, as if the reader wished to interject but the writer would not stop talking.
With that being said, Carr does use pathos to his advantage, but in my opinion, a few faux paus like he employed were a tad distracting and depleting from the power of the essay in disallowing the other side of the argument to have a say.
Logos
The fallacy also sneaks its way into Carr’s use of logos, or the appeal to logic, in his essay.  In an essay ripe with statistics and information used to back up his claim—as if remembering all too well how prominently he started out his essay with a batch of anecdotes and waxing apologetic for it—he creates a few problems for himself and for the reader.
Despite the early claims to having had his attention span and reading capabilities altered by use of the Internet, such as in his statement “…what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation…once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words.  Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (Carr, p. 1) he goes on and provides a dizzying amount of logos in a language rather unsuitable to readers with his same incapacity.  The following is a statement he uses later that for me took a few readings to partially comprehend:
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image.  It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed.  (Carr, p. 4)
Using context clues, and struggling through the remainder of the paragraph, the reader can understand what Carr is trying to say here.  And perhaps it is the author’s intention to write in the very manner that he himself has claimed to be unable to read as he could before, but in his effort to be clever and to use symbolism, he has successfully proven his point:  the reader is left to skimming and glossing over this portion of the already slightly lengthy (a mere seven pages, which according to his essay is bordering on being a tome) essay and missing some actually fascinating insights.
            Another indication in the loop of logic that Carr uses is his reference to the invention and development of the steam engine.  Though tying together all loose ends at the conclusion of his example, his transition into the example proved to be somewhat vague in its logos.  He builds off his earlier marvelous example of Friedrich Nietzsche, allowing the addition of a steam engine example on the basis that they were happening at the same time, goes into an intricate introduction of the example, and finally gets into the heat of things with the following statement:  “More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and philosopher.” (Carr, p. 5) Again, further reading of the essay proves to clarify the point that Carr is making, but to the “Google” generation of skimmers that Carr is writing to, this strategy could prove problematic.


Conclusion
Is Google, in fact, making us stupid?  The answer, of course, is left up to the reader.  According to Carr, it is not a matter of us becoming less intelligent or less capable of receiving information.  It is actually the mark of a new way of internalizing the information that we read, an effect on our ability to focus on a large amount of text, and how we retain or utilize information.  Through Carr’s use of ethos, pathos, and logos he expresses this idea and in my opinion, he does a very good job at it.  For my part, I agree with what he is saying.  There were, however, fallacies to the methods he was using.  The ethos he used misled the reader into thinking that Carr was perhaps more biased than he was, the pathos struck close to home but was kept from its potential due to Carr’s failure to incorporate how the other side might approach the topic, and the logos often defied the very point Carr was trying to get across.
Overall, the most detracting thing from the essay was Carr’s inability to properly employ the “double mind” referred to at the beginning of the essay.  Whether it was all part of his plan or not, he could not convey his point while portraying the two contrasting sides of the issue, starting with the title and going to the way he attempted to get his point across and to his failure to engage his audience.  Carr’s argument, though good, was kept from being great due to these simple errors.




References

Carr, Nicholas.  (1 Jul 2008).  Is Google Making Us Stupid?  Retrieved from Google.

2 comments:

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  2. According to Carr google is making us stupid Nicholas define this very well. But this time google is more needed for us google give lot of relief in our life. We use google maps for finding streets. We use google for making money I have read lot of is google making us stupid analysis. But in the 2015 theAtlantic post google making us smarter in this post all points have been cleared. His also define why Nicholas Carr writes is google making us stupid.

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