Technology writer Nicholas Carr, in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” examines how our brains are being reprogrammed to mirror how the Internet is set up: wired with short attention spans, prone to distractions, and common deep thinking seems to be outdated. Carr’s purpose is to stir discussion about how the Internet is negatively affecting our way of thinking and processing information. He adopts a pessimistic and skeptical tone to appeal to similar feelings and experiences in his literary and educated audience. He does this through pathos, ethos, and logos in his article.
Carr’s use of pathos is very apparent right from the beginning. In the title, his use of the word “stupid” is intended to create an emotional response from the readers, and it does. It creates an illusion of someone calling the reader stupid, thus evoking an emotion response of anger. This strategy is an effective way of getting people to read the rest of his article. The audience wants to find out why the title uses such a harsh word. Along with emotionally charged words, he also uses personal anecdotes as a way of developing his pathos throughout his article. Carr connects his own feelings and his friends’ feelings to what much of his audience feels. He talks about how he begins to feel as if he cannot keep his focus for a long time nor read as well or deeply as he used to.
Because his audience is well-educated and appreciate literature, these feelings can be much more likely shared between Carr and the audience, than an audience of people who rarely read long novels. This develops a sense of empathy between Carr and the readers, and by doing this, he increases the effectiveness of his argument. He even uses fear of technology to create an emotional response from the readers. “The gifted young men who founded Google….speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence…that might be connected directly to our brains” (27). The idea of having artificial intelligence in our heads is terrifying to many people. Most people are very alarmed of this idea because of the popular theme of robots gone rogue in our culture and movies like I, Robot or Terminator. Carr uses this stigma in our society to increase the effectiveness of his argument. Throughout his article, Carr utilizes pathos to further his argument.
Carr lacks a good development of ethos. He is an author of numerous books dealing with technology, business, and culture. One of his books was even a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. However, if someone does not know him and his background, they would not be able to grant him any credibility. He provides very little authority on what makes him on expert about this topic of technology in his article. This hinders the effectiveness of his argument, because many can dismiss his ideas because he has not established any of his credibility. He talks about how his friends echo his feelings as well, however, anyone can quote their friends and he does not state their credibility either. This turns out to not be a convincing argument.
Carr moves from anecdotes that develop his ethos or pathos, and begins his use of logos. He discusses a study done by a credible college, the University College London. The study concluded that “users are not reading online in the traditional sense” (7). This gives him hard and tangible evidence to use to further his argument; however, he does not analyze the study which ruins an opportunity for him to connect his claim and the solid study. He also quotes many people which interferes with his own voice and argument, and some do not add much to his argument.
He quotes Friedrich Nietzsche, explaining how a typewriter changed his writing style. This not a factual source because most of the quote is Nietzsche’s opinion and it was written more than 130 years ago. This hurts his logos appeal because it is not an logical argument to take this quote for facts. Also, the quote and the article are about similar ideas but are not very comparable. Comparing a typewriter to the Internet and the way it affects the brain are in much different ballparks, Carr’s lack of logos affects his argument because his audience is well educated and can appreciate statistics, which he does not give.
Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” is developed through pathos, ethos, and logos. Through this development, he develops his argument about how the internet is changing the way we think and process information. It is making it harder to critically think and read long pieces of writing. He uses pathos to create emotional responses in the readers to keep them reading and interested. He lacks ethos, even though he does have a lot of credibility. He uses studies and statistics for his logos but does not effectively analyze them which in turn hurts the effectiveness of his thesis. Overall, Carr uses pathos the most in his article but still has ethos and logos within.
