Google is Making Us Stupid, or Is It?

     "Is Google Making Us Stupid" is a splendidly written article that addresses the problems and changes the Internet as a whole has made in us since it was introduced. Nicholas Carr's skeptic views and arguments certainly make one think on how times have changed since all of the revolutionary inventions (books, the printing press, the clock, computers, the internet) came into the frame of time and history and how our brains have modified themselves to use these tools as efficiently as possible, perhaps like an automatic update to a new, more useful software. 
     Carr's claim was very negative towards the use of the web, and it seemed like he was scared (not to mention he wrote this article after watching "A Space Odyssey") that this new technology would indeed make us more dependent on it and ultimately more stupid. I disagree with that. Yes, it is obvious that the way of thinking in this "Internet Era" we live in has changed from "convectional" ways, but that is because the mediums have changed too. He mentioned that himself in his essay, when he wrote that the same research that used to take him hours in a library would take no longer that 10 minutes in the Internet. New mediums are by nature far more efficient and help getting tasks done faster, but he sees them almost as a doomsday device (Futurama reference). I do agree though, that we are very dependable on it. How many times have we not known perhaps the meaning of a word or the location of a placed and have just googled it? Heck, Google is now a verb that can be conjugated in the English language in almost every tense (yeah, the foreign guy is talking about the English language). Some of us have hit rock bottom and have not even take the time to open our phones but to just hold down the "Home" button and asked Siri the burning question we have in mind. That same efficacy that helps us get stuff done faster has also made us lazier, but that is the beauty of innovation and technological break throughs. They help us do more in less time, and also do things that we have not done before. With all of this being said, of course we are going to think differently! We are always bound to change the way we think and process information because settings never remain the same. It is quite obvious with technology, but even nature or our own body. The way we think about ourselves changes in the daily, and majorly as we hit different life stages. I doubt a seven-year-old thinks about him/herself exactly the same as a 15-year-old would. There are different interests and different perspectives, but that is the magic of time. I would personally think that we are more knowledge-full on average than people were 50 years ago. Here is why: by performing quick searches in our preferred browsing engine, most predominantly Google, we are able to gather more information about personal inquiries than people could back then. If I have a random thought about what is the lifespan of a Green Sea Turtle, I can just search that, and in less than a minute have my answer to it, and in less than five minutes have learned about specific facts that make that species unique. Now, if we backtrack to 50 years ago, it would have taken me 15 to 20 minutes to get to my local library, another 15 or so to find the sections that talk about turtles, and finally another five to find out the book is no longer there, but they have one available in a library 10 miles away. The information in the net is limitless, and our knowledge can be too, it is just a matter of time until our brains adjust to this colossal medium to start noticing the changes.