101 Sample Outline, Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid”

The first source Nicholas Carr uses is the Space Odyssey and he relates to it by saying that it makes him afraid that we are going to become more emotionless and dehumanized as time goes on.


Clive Thompson- likes technology yay

Mcluhan- changes the way we’re thinking

Scott Karp- agrees with Mcluhan, shapes the way he thinks

Friedman- cuts short the way he reads, can’t read anything for long

Scholars at University of London- people read as a form of skimming, good readers to “power browse”

Maryanne Wolf- not only is it just reading but ourselves too. Technology forms who we are and changes us. Largely disengaged.

Nietzsche- Typewriter helped him when he was blind but his writing changed. Saved him as a writer but changed his style of writing, more compact more mechanical.

James Olds, professor of neuroscience- the brain changes. Has ability to reprogram itself on the fly

Daniel Bell- “intellectual technologies” disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in mathematically measured sequences

Weizenbaum- an example, the clock. We now have breakfast at 7 o’clock instead of when we’re hungry. We start to think like the machines.

Alan Turing- a British mathematician proved, before we even had computers, that computers and the Internet were going to function as all of our other machines too. For example, our clock, calculator, phone, radio, and tv.

Then, Carr continues to talk about how people’s minds become more attuned to internet and television. Also how the modern media talks about how they want to shorten things such as article lengths and make everything less efficient and we have nothing else to do but go along with it. He starts talking about how around the time Nietzsche used his typewriter, another man named Frederick Winslow Taylor started carrying a stopwatch in order to improve the plant’s machinists in the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia. He made his workers work harder and more efficiently and they didn’t like it but complied. It made other business owners seek maximum speed, efficiency, and output. He changes leads and focuses on the positives of the technology for machinery in that paragraph.

Eric Schmidt- Google’s chief executive. He says that Google is looking to systematize everything it does.

Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates- Feared that as people relied more on the written word than the knowledge in their head that they’d become forgetful.

Hieronimo Squarciafico- worried that easy access to too many books would make people lazy and less studious.

Clay Shirky- Agrees with arguments against printing press however does appreciate the blessings that the printed word would deliver

Richard Foreman- concerned that we will become “pancake people” as we evolve under the pressure of information overload. Also that we will lose our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance”.

Then Carr goes back to recap what he said in the beginning about the 2001 Space Odyssey. He concludes it all by using more critics that support his belief against technology but does use some critics here and there that support it. Overall what he is saying is that although the internet does come with a tremendous amount of good and has easy information at your fingertips, it comes at a price. We are in the generation that literally only focuses on technology because we have it all; computers, phones, clocks, tv’s, xboxes, iPads, etc. In the Space Odyssey, they predicted that humans would become emotionless and go about their days in an almost robotic efficiency. People have become so reliant on technology that they sacrifice their ability to concentrate and to be intellectual. Carr states in his last sentence that he agrees with Kubrick’s dark prophecy that as we continue to rely on computers to understand the world, it’s our own intelligence that we transform into artificial intelligence.