Changing Brain Waves, One Click at a Time

Nearly every student has had to use Google at some point in their academic career. Whether it was researching for a huge academic paper, or to look up the answer to some homework problems, there is not one single college student who can deny having ever used a search engine. I for one use Google almost daily for everything from entertainment, to exploration of new school topics. In Carr’s article, he makes a statement that the use of search engines is, in fact, decreasing our intelligence. He thinks this because we no longer have to delve deeply into books to get the information that is desired; now all that is needed is a few keystrokes. With this absence of deep reading, some conclude that an absence of deep thinking will coincide. We will risk becoming, “pancake people,” spread so thin that we can no longer think deeply about certain subjects. I disagree with Carr’s statement; I think that Google allows us to process information more efficiently. With the invention of the search engine, we have access to information that we may have never come across without it. Google allows the ability to process information more efficiently, which contributes to one’s critical thinking abilities. In today’s world a person needs to process information very quickly and resourcefully, and the internet aids in that aspect. Just as the inventions of writing, paper, and the printing press have shaped the way humans think in the past, the advent of the internet has completely changed the way we think and perform tasks. Our brains have adapted with every new development in the history of reading and writing, so one can only imagine what new ways we will learn to reason. The future is exciting, and change will always be on the brain.