Nicholas Carr, the author of Is Google Making Us Stupid, is a writer on technology and culture in which his books has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Carr has written for multiple big-name publishers such as The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Nature, Wired, and MIT Technology Review. Carr has received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association in 2015. He has a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University. Carr has written many other articles, journal entries, blogs, and posts related to technology and how it plays a roll in how we learn and read. (www.nicholascarr.com/)
When Carr was writing Is Google Making Us Stupid, he was writing towards the people who were raised in the age where almost everyone has a cell phone and information is available at your fingertips. He is also writing towards people who argue that reading online and the Internet is either helping us learn, read, and write better or it is making it worse on us as a generation. Not everyone who Carr considers his audience may agree with his argument which he backs up with evidence and main points that all his audience may adhere to.
Carr’s purpose in writing this text is to make the claim that the reason for the downfall for the concentration factor and having the feeling the brain is changing in a way is due to the Internet. He also claims that “The Web has been a godsend” to him as a writer. Carr talks about how his mind isn’t going bad but rather feels as if his mind is changing. His mind is changing because everything that he is doing now seems much easier with the use of the Internet. Carr recalls how “A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.” Just as Carr suggests how the Internet has helped him, I can also say that the Internet has also helped me get to what I’m looking for more effectively than I would if I was to look for information that I need in physical copies of books.
Carr’s published work was published in the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic under the technology section. During that time, you can say that technology and the use of the Internet really started to rapidly consume people and the way we started to think, read, write, and how we did our daily routines. The development of technology has been rapidly evolving since the time the article was written and published all the way to present day. This article contains many researches from other publishers such as when successful students from University College London who published a study of different habits people have when it comes to online researching (Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?). The downfall that could come from the text being published is that there aren’t any new or updated studies between 2017 and 2018 that broadens on the topics touched on in the text. The information within the text is still valid today but more updated information and studies would seem more credible and relatable to Carr’s audience today.
The genre of Is Google Making Us Stupid? is informative and technology education. Carr is informing his audience on main points and evidence based from researches and studies. Carr mentions how in his book in 1976, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation, late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum had observed how the view of the earth in which came from the vast use of timekeeping tools “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality” (Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?). The information provided by Carr is to inform, teach, and make an argument for his audience to interact with. Carr states “the Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition” (Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?) which points directly to the genre of technology education because not only is Carr referring to the way technology effects our mind, the way we read, and carry on in our daily lives, he is teaching us how technology is helping us in those ways as well in many other different phrases within the text.