Talk:Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Great work
Nice to see a detailed overview of this essay is available. Nicholas Carr's got a book coming out in June 2010... The Shallows... same subject. Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nietzsche lingua (talk • contribs) 19:38, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, it is a testament to the quality of the article that it attracts so many new and diverse contributors willing to improve it further! Skomorokh,  barbarian  19:41, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Dear Skomorokh - why was the author banned? he is obviously very skillful. thanks in advance for your reply. --80.9.165.218 (talk) 02:31, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

The problem is neither Google nor the Internet
I think we need some serious criticism about Nicholas G. Carr's focus, as it misses the entire point. The problem has to do with how we use the Internet, not the Internet itself. Silicon Valley is aware that the "Google" paradigm, or the w3, is only an interim step between the desktop and pervasive computing models that will extend information into every aspect of our lives, and embed itself into the very fabric of reality (cf. Asimoz's Gaia and Cameron's Pandora). This is difficult for some people to envision when they don't understand technology, but it makes perfect sense when you think it all the way through. This means, essentially, that hardware disappears. The real underlying problem that needs to be addressed has to do with the neuroergonomics of augmented cognition, an issue that nobody wants to discuss. The real issue isn't how our brain is changing in response to the Internet, but how we will use it to swim through a new ocean of information that becomes an extension of who and what we are. Viriditas (talk) 01:32, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Advocacy journalsim
The infobox claims this essay (and the argument in general) is categorized as advocacy journalism. I find that difficult to believe. Any evidence for this POV? Viriditas (talk) 04:27, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Looking at this diff and its surrounding edits, it looks like this category was changed from "opinion journalism" to "advocacy journalism" based on something the user read on a blog, but that's just a guess. I'm curious though, is this truly advocacy journalism?  Because Carr does not seem to be advocating anything.  He's exploring a question and looking at history and science to get an answer.  He's really not advocating for either side.  Yes, he's openly critical of technology in his work, but this isn't advocacy, this is healthy skepticism. Viriditas (talk)

oh, the irony...
Does anyone other than I find this WP article to be ironic? One of Carr's points is that we today are losing the capacity, if not the will, to read long textual arguments (e.g., books). Yet Carr's article is about 80% the length of this WP article (~4200 words v. ~5200 words [not counting all the notes, ex-links, and bib, cats, etc., typical of a WP page]). So if Carr is right, we should prefer his original article to this analysis. Just food for thought .... RedJ 17 (talk) 20:28, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I think for the most part, over time, Carr's argument (which he explores in even more detail in his book and other articles) has proven to be not only correct but supported and substantiated by current research. This article is longer than his original article because Wikipedia prefers to write about topics using secondary sources. Viriditas (talk) 21:11, 18 May 2015 (UTC)