The Pancake People

 In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” shown in The Atlantic, it presents the reader with a view on technology, which is often overlooked. He states that sites, like Google, are manipulating our minds to quickly search for information, the quickly skim it, and then find something else to do.  We are becoming “Skimmers of the Twenty-First Century”. In my opinion, Google can do both, make us more intelligent in knowledge, while also decreasing our attention span in deep-reading. With Google it is easy to go from one article to the next. So our attention span for something that is two paragraphs, opposed to a five page essay, is much greater.  This is primarily because we can explore so many sites, that we find it odd to read something that says the same info in a long essay; compared to a short and concise paragraph that quickly and intelligently states all the same items of importance.  I know for a fact I am a skimmer, but I think of the pros and cons to this. One pro is that I can find things of importance much faster in a large article, able to pick out what I find important and skip over what I feel is unimportant. However, with every pro, there is a con.  My con is that now, in textbooks and in articles of importance, I find it extremely hard to dig deep into the text.  

Nicholas Carr states, “Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”. Is this true? Yes. I can type in “Napoleon” and about 127,000,000 results show up. The most interesting part however, is that it took Google .11 seconds to gather
all these WebPages from their database. In .11 second s I have everything I need to know to
write an essay on Napoleon.

The info is right there, there is no need for the library, no need for verbal communication, and hardly any reason for deep thinking. I am able to skim every webpage given to me, and only one, maybe, will I go into a deep trance of thought. So how ironic, that Carr would make his article so long, I could hardly pay attention to it. So let me ask you something, did you skim, or did you think and process the words that I have just stated?

I fear of becoming a “Pancake people”, what would change? What would I being doing? How would I be educated? One thing is for sure however, the human race is ever growing and forever evolving, so the future can hold, whatever we make it to be.