Gutenberg to Google

According to Alexa, an organization that collects internet traffic data, Google is the most visited website on the internet. The top list includes other comparable websites such as Yahoo and Microsoft Live search are ranked fourth and seventh respectively, as well as other regional versions of Google cracking the top 25. This definitively proves that human beings are using the internet as it was originally intended to be used, as a tool to help people find information faster than ever before. However, as a society, humans tend to accept technology that makes life easier, and may not consider the long term implications of the miracle work of computer scientists like Sergey Brin and Larry Page. In Nicholas Carr's article entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid?, he pauses to explore these implications and worries that the convenience of this mighty and near omniscient program may be eroding humanity's intelligence and attention span. It should be noted that despite his direct naming of Google in his title, he is using it as a symbol of the greater internet searching and instant results society that now exists in most of the world. Although he raises some valid points, this essay will expose and critique his opinions through a comparison of the internet to the Gutenberg Press and its effect on the way it changed human thought, challenged the status quo and upset the economic system that surrounded the knowledge industry.

As Nicholas Carr points out in his article, the venerable Socrates denounced the use of writing. He worried that:

He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” ....