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.
