Carr - Thompson

Zach Fredrickson
Salt Lake Community College
English 1010

Millions of years ago, early humans lowered themselves down from their
arboreal homes in Africa and began walking on two limbs instead of four. From there

they learned to harness fire, beat crudely-hewn tools out of stone, and eventually
went on to till the earth and develop agriculture. From the beginning, humans set
themselves apart from the rest of the animal kingdom with their knack for critical
thinking: the ability to identify an obstacle and to create a solution to remove the
problem or get around it. With these new tools and technology come in a new wave
of thoughts, ideals, and perspectives of the world around us. Today, several
thousand years later, the internet is making these waves change. Writers Nicholas
Carr and Clive Thompson discuss the effects that the internet is having on our
thinking in their essays Is Google Making Us Stupid? and Smarter than You Think:
How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, respectively. Although Carr
and Thompson can both agree that the internet is reshaping the way we think, their
key differences lie in the nuanced details: whether or not this change is positive,
what the further-reaching effects are, and where to go from there. Carr insists that
we are restricting our cognition while Thompson argues that we are augmenting our
mental capabilities.
Carr seems to be worried that we are losing touch with our natural humanity
one invention at a time, and this is evident with his recount of our innovational
history. He introduces to us the mechanical clock. Despite its momentous influence
on productivity and the sciences, Carr argues, it wasn't a complete victory. Carr
concedes that "The clock's methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific
mind and the scientific man," but then emphasizes that "it also took something
away. . . we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock" (2008).
According to Carr, Friedrich Nietzsche similarly lost the essence of his work when he
made the switch from old-fashioned pen and paper to the typewriter. His prose
"changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to

telegram" with the acquisition of his new Malling-Hansen Writing Ball (2008). His
literary work became mechanical, machine-like as if in reciprocation to the new
medium, and thus, the end of an era for Nietzsche.
Thompson, on the other hand, holds a more pragmatic view of our
technological adaptations. He dichotomizes the typical reactions he has observed in
these revolutionary inventions: "Depending on which Victorian-age pundit you
asked, the telegraph was either going to usher in an era of world peace . . . or
drown us in a Sargasso of idiotic trivia. Neither prediction was quite right, of course,
yet neither was quite wrong" (Thompson, 2013). These paradigm shifts are
inherently neutral, merely adding to our repertoire of tools and abilities (or possibly
subtracting in some cases). Beware of the sensationalists: the yea-sayers reveling
in their utopian pipedreams and the naysayers bitterly resisting change. The latter,
Thompson would likely agree, is the lot that Carr belongs to.
So what is Carr's gripe with the internet anyway? According to him, it is
responsible for "chipping away at [his] capacity for concentration and
contemplation." Along with some colleagues of his, he blames this newfound
distractedness for the fact that he is longer be the "voracious book reader" that he
once was (Carr, 2008). But how exactly did the internet, a digital information
system, hamper their abilities to sit and enjoy a thorough reading of books like War
and Peace? He theorizes that by browsing internet pages chock full of flashing
advertisements and colorful hyperlinks that teleport you through the virtually
endless web of information for hours at a time, day after day, and year after year,
our minds are unconsciously being molded to think like computers. Ever
increasingly, we are "[putting] efficiency and immediacy above all else"(Carr, 2008).
On this note, both Carr and Thompson can agree; our minds are being conditioned

through our all but unavoidable exposure to the internet. We are becoming
accustomed to quicker results and more informational access than ever.
But this poses the ultimate problem for Carr, for he agrees with Maryanne
Wolf, developmental psychologist at Tufts University, that "deep reading is
indistinguishable from deep thinking" (2008). For why would a generation raised on
the internet take the time to deconstruct and analyze the themes, character
developments, and plot structures of Leo Tolstoy's 1,225 page behemoth when with
a mere fraction of the effort, they could plug War and Peace into Google's search
engine and get 67,700,000 page results of summaries, explanations, and analyses
on the subject in a matter of 0.62 seconds. But whether this is the end of the road
for us who would like to read War and Peace at some point in our lives, Thompson
would say, is debatable.
Surely, Thompson agrees that it would be impossible to escape the deluge of
data and stimulations of the internet entirely unscathed. In fact, he would unlikely
discredit Carr's attention-deficit blues, but rather argue that maybe he simply has a
too-narrow scope of the issue. Here, Thompson sees broader horizons than his
counterpart. What is most important when new innovations surface, he proposes, is
that we learn how these tools bias our everyday lives so we can learn how to
integrate them with previously established methods and use them to expand our
capabilities (2013). This is no different case with the internet. The internet,
Thompson suggests, holds three primary biases: "They allow for prodigious external
memory, make it easier for us to find connections that were previously invisible,
[and] encourage a superfluity of communication and publishing" (2013). These
three shifts, in Thompson's opinion, have the most profound impacts on our

cognition. And in turn, if well-understood and implemented resourcefully, "can be an

enormous boon to thinking" (2013).
Instead of lamenting computers' ever-increasing presence, we should just
suck it up and learn to use them to our fullest advantage. They should be used to
augment our skills, just as amateur chess players Steve Cramton and Zackary
Stephen did in the computer-human hybrid, "freestyle" chess tournament . What
they understood very well, was that while a computer may lack intuition, and no
computer (so far, at least) can be taught intuition, it can make trillions of
calculations per second, formulating all possible options within the blink of an eye.
This database of information, when equipped to Cramton's and Stephen's strategic
and situational awareness, was key to their victory (Thompson, 2013). With the
collaboration of man and machine, the so-called amateurs were able to trump
Chess' grandmasters and win the tournament. Thompson retells chess grandmaster
Garry Kasparov's words: "Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical
acuity of a computer was overwhelming" (2013).
So, we are left wondering what to think. Those of us who may be swayed by
Carr's appeal to our fear of losing touch, may be influenced to close ourselves off
from the inevitable change and progress. But again, we must remember that this
sense of disillusionment is typical of change, and "that every new technology
pushes us towards new forms of behavior while nudging us away from older,
familiar ones" (Thompson, 2008). We have to look past the unfamiliarity of it all, and
use the internet to our fullest capabilities. It is an invaluable resource that should
not be overlooked or under-used.