24 pages • 48 minutes read
Nicholas CarrIs Google Making Us Stupid?
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Clock
Carr invokes the clock as a form of technology that altered human consciousness. In his perspective, the systematization of time into the scientifically-ordered increments of the clock caused humans to conceptualize time as an objective reality, and not something dependent upon and shaped by human activity. The clock divorced the passage of time from the passage of human activity because it structured the idea of time as something dictated by the scientific and objective ticking of the clock’s hands. This is a powerful illustration of the impact on human technology that renders the artificiality of such technologies highly visible. Through this symbol, Carr invites his reader to analogously consider the impact of the Internet as an artificial technology. Instead of taking it for granted as an instrument that delivers reality to us, Carr asks us to understand it as a technology that shapes human reality.
The Printing Press
The printing press functions as a symbol in a similar way to the clock. However, Carr’s invocation of the printing press is a bit more sustained and recurring. Through it, he parses another key aspect of the Internet as a technology. The symbol of the printing press invites the reader to examine how the medium that we encounter written texts shapes the way those texts are understood, processed, and interacted with. For Carr, the printing press increased the availability of knowledge and created the intellectual space to consider ideas and draw connections through sustained thought. The Internet collapses these conventions through its mandate for efficiency. These mandates have the effect of papering over subtlety and run counter to sustained contemplation over time as people become accustomed to having knowledge delivered in easily digestible bits. Just as the printing press has had an undeniably and historically-studied effect on human cognition, so the Internet will and does. The key difference is that human society has had the time to consider the influence of the printing press because of its invention hundreds of years ago. We do not have the same luxury with the Internet, whose influence was only beginning at the time of the essay’s writing. Carr’s invocation of the older technology’s impact therefore serves to chasten and caution the reader against uncritically accepting the Internet and its vast effect upon human thought and society.
The Supercomputer HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
As a motif, HAL occurs at the beginning and end of the essay. Carr focuses on the strange poignancy of the supercomputer’s plea to live unmolested to its human administrator. He does this to refocus the reader’s attention on technology. In Carr’s view, we cannot and should not view advanced pieces of technology as merely objective tools, but as complex items that were both created by human civilization and exercise nuanced influence upon human life. The anthropomorphized HAL is a perfect instrument for mounting this assertion, as it is an (albeit fantastically and fictionally-rendered) bit of technology that functions not as an objective tool, but as a mirror. Through this symbol, Carr asks his reader to view technology as something intimately and intricately involved in the fabric of human life—not just a tool to get to where we think we want to go.
