Stupid or Progress?

This article is actually quite familiar to me.  In a different writing class at a different college, we were assigned to read this article and write a research paper on the subject.  Apparently there is a trend with writing classes and this subject.

Anyways, I still stand by what I said a few years ago on this subject.  Google isn’t the thing that is making us stupid.  The web is changing us, but different isn’t always bad.  The article even mentioned the irony of Socrates complaining about the written word because we would lose our great power of memory.  In his time, people were able to recite from memory stories that would be hundreds of pages long in print.  True, we have lost that ability, but we have gained more universal sharing of information and ideas.  The web may lesson our attention span, but where would we be today without it?  You wouldn’t be able to see this blog post unless I showed you my thoughts in writing in person.  I might not have even been able to find “Is Google Making Us Stupid” because I would have to obtain a paper copy.  And can you imagine registering for this class if we all had to stand in line instead of just taking a few clicks on mygfu.com?  The web has brought great convenience to the world, and has helped to spread knowledge even further than books could.  I love books, and I love the nostalgia of sitting and reading Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice for hours, but it doesn’t mean there are no benefits to the new web.  Humans adapt, and this is the next stage of humanity.

It was rather ironic, though, that Carr is complaining how we have no patience to read long web articles and he decides to write a long web article on the fact.