Toulmin Model- Nicholas Carr

A point of a cursor, the click of the mouse, and boom- everything you could ever imagine: every answer to any question you could possibly have is at your finger tips in an instant. How has this change affected our culture? In Nicholas Carr's article, Is Google making Us Stupid?, he evaluates some of the negative effects the internet might be having on our brains. "What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation." Carr reflects on how the World Wide Web might be changing the way people think and find information. Internet might make access to information easy, however it also might allow its users to become lazy and shorten our attention spans. "The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing." the author uses his friends experiences to discuss our slowly dwindeling attention spans. The capability of having instant gratification makes users become greedy, and in our fast paced world we have become to demand everything to be available as fast as possible from our food to finding a quote in a book. "They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site." The article talks about how researchers have reverted to a form of "skimming" versus reading for what they're looking for. Nothing is ever fast enough, up to date enough, or short enough for our techno-centric world.