Is Google making us stupid?

This text is an article by Nicholas Carr. The article was posted on www.theatlantic.com the 1st of July 2008. Primarily the text deals with how the Internet has affected the human brain through the years and the consequences of the constant and raising search on the Internet. Nicholas Carr has managed to write an article in an amazing way, in where he really catches the readers’ attention, even from the first lines.
In this essay my focus will be the three appeals, the structure and the audience of this article.

Nicholas Carr has managed to construct this article in a very remarkable way. He introduces the essay with sentences from a movie in which a supercomputer takes control of the world. Maybe Nicholas think that that supercomputer very well could be a regular computer today because in some way the computers have taken control over the human brain through the years. He claims this because every person nowadays have either a computer with Internet or at some point have been to the Internet elsewhere. He simply thinks that people have become too lazy and if something is bothering them, they can just pick up the computer, write a few lines and “bum” there’s their answer, to what they were looking for. Simple and easy.
Nicholas also manages to make a link and a fluently transition between the introduction and the main text. In the end of the introduction it says, “I can feel it. I can feel it.” And when he starts the main text it says, “I can feel it too”.
He is very subjective in his writing, but that is very well chosen because maybe Nicholas’ intentions were to create some debate about this topic among people.

Nicholas Carr has chosen to be very subjective in this article, which in fact should make him very untrustworthy, but he is not because he choses to make a lot of quotations from famous people, who all agree with him in his opinions, although that could make him a little untrustworthy because his choices of quotations have only been on those who agree with him, and not those who do not, which there always will be.
When he chooses to write the article with all those quotations he establishes his ethos and that makes him very trustworthy. For example, he quotes Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media and he answers a question, which he had just asked himself and he says, “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?” With this quote, Nicholas shows that it’s not only him, who thinks it’s a problem with the raising Internet browsing throughout the world.
Besides by appealing to ethos he also appeals to logos. For example when he claims that people don’t have the concentration to read a book. Or when he says that people have become too lazy to not figure out the facts themselves but just browse the Internet, most of the times Google is used as the title also refers to. By saying this, Nicholas appeals to the logical because it seems to be logical that people will just browse on Google instead of finding their knowledge elsewhere and therefore they become lazier.
Nicholas Carr has even managed to get all of the three appeals in his article because he also appeals to Pathos in his writing. For example the title “Is Google making us stupid” awakes some feelings in us. Some might even feel the title a bit offensive and they might rethink the topic, from the very beginning. Again a very well chosen title for this article.

Nicholas Carr’s audience to this article is very large, because as said above almost every person in this world have in some way tried to browse the Internet or at least they know about it and especially Google is known worldwide.
The majority of the audience might be teenagers and especially students, who make their homework and assignments by letting Google, help them everyday. Google is indispensable in a student’s life. In some way Google might also be a lazy way to find out the facts for a student instead of picking a book and find them there.

It’s very easy to see that Nicholas Carr has given this article and the topic in general a lot of thought and he has become very intelligent on this topic and although Nicholas has his opinion about this topic others have theirs and the conclusion of that will be an eternal discussion about whether the Internet is a good thing or a bad thing. The technologies develop all the time and every day and it’s almost impossible to keep up. For some people, the internet will be a smart and easy way to find out facts, others like to do it the old-fashioned way and look it up in books and at least some people simply don’t know how to use it and will end up looking in books anyway. Others might just give up.