Zaynab Abdusamad 

Professor Overby 

English 111 

June 13, 2023 

Single Source Analytical Essay 

Google is a search engine many of us are familiar with. It has allowed us to expand our knowledge and understanding with the simple touch of a button. However, although these resourceful tools have helped make our day-to-day lives a lot easier, they’re actually doing a significant amount of damage to us. The use of Google and search engines in general are causing a negative impact on society because of how they affect the way we read, how it is causing our brain to change, and because it is causing our critical thinking to deteriorate. 

In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” written by Nicholas Carr, Carr asks the question “what is the internet doing to our brains?” He then argues that the usage of search engines, as a whole is not making us smarter, which is opposed to popular beliefs, but is actually making us “dumber” because our brains are not being challenged due to the instant gratification that these search engines provide for us. 

There is no doubt that today “we read much more than we did in the 1970s or 1980s,” Nicholas Carr says, however, search engines are having a negative impact on society because they are changing how we read material, especially online reading material. An experiment conducted at University College London by several scholars showed that people tend to hop from multiple reading sources while only reading one to two pages per article and have no intention of going back to the former text and reading more. I have also noticed that when I am reading articles online, especially lengthy ones, I will skim through the paragraphs, read only a couple, and then proceed to look for a new source. This is why I agree with this point made in the article. Just like the internet, we are looking for that “efficiency” and “immediacy” that we have become accustomed to. However, this is ruining our deep reading capabilities because as Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University explains reading is a skill that must be honed because “It’s not etched into our genes” rather “We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand” but because of society’s usage of the internet over traditional books “circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works,” Carr says. 

Another reason search engines are having a negative impact on society is because of how they are changing our brain composition. Contrary to what some people believe, James Olds, a professor of neuroscience, describes the brain as being “very plastic” and therefore “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.” However, due to this brain flexibility we eventually “begin to take on the qualities of those technologies,” Carr states. The creation of the clock is an example used to describe this. Before the clock people essentially did what they wanted to do whenever they wanted but once the mechanical clock became a part of everyone's daily lives “In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock, Carr states and began to operate "like clockwork.” Therefore, in a world where our brains have become accustomed to “hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws,” as Carr mentions, our brains have become to operate “like computers.” This is another point I agree with because I believe, as a society, we have gotten more impatient with things that take time and instead want results immediately, because of the instant gratification that these search engines bring us. 

Lastly, search engines are having a negative impact on society because they are causing our critical thinking to deteriorate. According to the article, when the printing press arrived in the fifteenth century Hieronimo Squarciafico, an Italian humanist, worried that having easy access to many books would lead to “intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.” At first, when I read this idea, I thought the opposite and believed since people have easy access to such a large amount of knowledge, they will in fact become more studious and their minds will become even stronger. However, after thinking about this statement for a while, I came to agree. Often when people have too much of something they do not have to work as hard for it. In school, for example, before the internet was used, children would have to go to libraries to check out books or use their textbooks from class to complete research assignments. They then would have to read those books, but also understand what they were reading and apply what they learned to that specific assignment. Now, however, when there is a research project to be completed students just type whatever it is that they are looking for, wait for the answer to pop up, and write it down. Even though they are performing the same task via book or search engine. Obtaining information from a book is a much more brain engaging task because in order to understand what the individual just reads, they must be focused and attentive, which involves critical thinking skills. But when trying to research on the internet, most of the content is already shortened down because the information is supposed to be obtained quickly and easily. This allows the person to not have to be as engaged and attentive as the other would when gathering information from a book. Therefore, this does not allow critical thinking skills to be challenged which leads to the “intellectual laziness” and “weakening of minds” that Hieronimo Squarciafico feared for. 

Thanks to search engines we are allowed to consume vast amounts of information within a short period of time with almost little to no effort at all. However, even though we have easy access to profound knowledge it is harming us in the process. Search engines have caused the way we read to be changed, our brain composition to become altered, and for our critical thinking skills to deteriorate. In a recent essay written by Richard Foreman, a playwright, he describes how we (The West) were a “structure of the highly educated and articulate personality,” however it has changed due to the effects of search engines and has caused us to evolve “under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the instantly available.” This causes us to question if these search engines truly are making us smarter. 

Works Cited

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, July 2008, 

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/.