Article Summaries

The two article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and “The Internet Is No Substitute for the Dying Newspaper Industry” state their opposing outlooks on the effects of Google, the internet, and technology.
The first article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” by Nicholas Carr, explains how we have become so used to Google and the internet giving us the quick answers to basically everything that we want, that it has become harder for us to go about our daily lives, or even simply read a book, anymore without it. I sadly have fallen victim to this myself. The writer tells how his “concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.” I, too, used to be able to read tons of books when I was younger. However, as the years have gone by, and I have become more accustomed to the internet-taking advantage of the brevity of AOL news rather than actual newspapers, and just searching Google for the shorter version of the book I was assigned to read for Literature class- I seem to have lost that ability to sit through reading a simple 200 page novel.
This may seem like a negative aspect of the rising use of internet and search engines, such as Google, but I believe that it has also increased my knowledge of so many different things I may never have been introduced to if not for the internet. I can now search so many assorted texts, researches, maps, stories, and online articles on about anything and everything. Even if I’m wondering what tomorrow’s weather will be, I can easily find out with the click of a few buttons.
Google continues to successfully accomplished it’s goal of gathering the world’s information and making it “universally accessible and useful.” However, Google’s computer genius founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, might be taking their ideas one step too far. They are now working on turning their online search engine into an artificial intelligence attached to our brains. Personally, this is a very scary thought to me. I would not want my brain being taken over my a computer chip stored with all different kinds of random facts. Then again, am I putting these random, maybe even erroneous, facts into my head on my own just by using the internet as my #1 guidance for all my inquiries and turning to Google for the answer to all my daily questions?
In the article “The Internet Is No Substitute for the Dying Newspaper Industry” the decline of newspapers is not being blamed on the rise of the internet and technology, but rather on the “intellectual poverty of our post-literate world.” People in our generation have just become too adapted and comfortable with short reading and quick moving images on the screen that we don’t even bother to pick up a newspaper anymore.
Chris Hedges relates his concerns about newspapers journalist all around the world losing their jobs, and about how and increasing amount of people are now referring to the Internet as their source for current event updates. He says that newspapers “are a public trust” informing citizens about cultural and political life by hiring people “to write about city hall, the state capital, political campaigns, sports, music, art and theater.” Hedges states that people who rely on the Internet as their source for news will be apt to return to those specific sites which support their opinions and viewpoint. The author tries to reinforce his position by warning the public that we should be careful not to lose our journalists and reporters of the newspapers to bloggers because “facts, for many bloggers, are interchangeable with opinions,” whereas journalism gives you all the details of the present story whether you want to hear it or not. I agree with the author in the sense that people who turn to the internet for their source of news may only be reading one side of the story; although, I still believe that many have benefited from the internet’s news reports. I mean, I know even though I may enjoy picking up a newspaper on a Sunday morning, my 15-year old brother would never be able to sit through reading an entire newspaper article and the short news posts or videos he picks up from the internet may be all he’s getting all week long.