Is Google Making Us Stupid?/GA1 - Reception

Reception

Carr's essay was widely discussed in the media both critically and in passing. While English technology writer Bill Thompson observed that Carr's argument had "succeeded in provoking a wide-ranging debate", Damon Darlin of The New York Times quipped that even though " has been talking about article in The Atlantic magazine", only "ome subset of that group has actually read the 4,175-word article, by Nicholas Carr." The controversial online responses to Carr's essay were, according to Chicago Tribune critic Steve Johnson, partly the outcome of the essay's title "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", a question that the article proper doesn't actually pose and that he believed was "perfect fodder for a 'don't-be-ridiculous' blog post"; Johnson challenged his readers to carefully consider their online responses in the interest of raising the quality of debate.

Many critics discussed the merits of Carr's essay at great length in forums set up formally for this purpose at online hubs such as the Britannica Blog and publisher John Brockman's online scientific magazine Edge, where the roster of names quickly took on the semblance of a Who's Who of the day's Internet critics. Calling it "the great digital literacy debate", British-American entrepreneur and author Andrew Keen judged the victor to be the American reader, who was blessed with a wide range of compelling writing from "all of America's most articulate Internet luminaries".

Book critic Scott Esposito pointed out that Chinese characters are incorrectly described as ideograms in Carr's essay, an error that he believed undermined the essay's argument. The myth that Chinese script is ideographic had been effectively debunked in scholar John DeFrancis' 1984 book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy; DeFrancis classifies Chinese as a logosyllabic writing system. Carr acknowledged that there was a debate over the terminology of 'ideogram', but in a response to Esposito he explained that he had "decided to use the common term" and quoted The Oxford American Dictionary to demonstrate that they likewise define Chinese characters as instances of ideograms.

Writer and activist Seth Finkelstein noted that predictably several critics would label Carr's argument as a Luddite one, and he was not to be disappointed when one critic later maintained that Carr's "contrarian stance slowly forcing him into a caricature of Luddism". Then, journalist David Wolman, in a Wired magazine piece, described as "moronic" the assumption that the web "hurts us more than it helps", a statement that was preceded by an overview of the many technologies that had been historically denounced; Wolman concluded that the solution was "better schools as well as a renewed commitment to reason and scientific rigor so that people can distinguish knowledge from garbage".

Several prominent scientists working in the field of neuroscience supported Carr's argument as scientifically plausible. James Olds, a professor of computational neuroscience, who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, was quoted in Carr's essay for his expertise, and upon the essay's publication Olds wrote a letter to the editor of The Atlantic in which he reiterated that the brain was "very plastic" — referring to the changes that occur in the organization of the brain as a result of experience. It was Olds' opinion that given the brain's plasticity it was "not such a long stretch to Carr's meme". One of the pioneers in neuroplasticity research, Michael Merzenich, later added his own comment to the discussion, stating that he had given a talk at Google in 2008 in which he had asked the audience the same question that Carr asked in his essay. Merzenich believed that there was "absolutely no question that our brains are engaged less directly and more shallowly in the synthesis of information, when we use research strategies that are all about 'efficiency', 'secondary (and out-of-context) referencing', and 'once over, lightly'". Another neuroscientist, Gary Small, director of UCLA's Memory & Aging Research Center, wrote a letter to the editor of The Atlantic in which he stated that he believed that "brains are developing circuitry for online social networking and are adapting to a new multitasking technology culture".