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Google is a powerful tool—right at our fingertips—and we often don’t realize just how powerful it truly is. So much is available to us, whether we want to check last night’s score of our favorite football team or learn more about one of the presidents of the United States. The amount of information we have access to is endless.

After reading Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, I found it really thought-provoking and insightful. Carr’s point about how Google gives us so much information, yet makes us overly reliant on it, really stood out to me. Technology as a whole seems to promote shallow thinking, and even though it brings many benefits, I believe it poses more negatives than positives—no matter how much we may love it.

The ability to think critically for ourselves is weakening, which can lead to serious problems. As we know, the average attention span today is at an all-time low. In the article, Carr reflects on his own experience, noticing that his ability to concentrate on long texts has diminished. He connects this change to the way online reading promotes distraction through hyperlinks, ads, and short snippets of information. The internet, he suggests, conditions our brains to expect fast access and instant results, which undermines the patience required for deep thinking and critical analysis.

I completely agree with Carr’s analysis. It’s not just Google—it’s technology in general, especially computers and social media, that contribute to this issue. We rely on technology too much and often form our thoughts based on what we see online, disregarding original ideas and how we truly process information.

That’s not to say I don’t use the internet—of course I do. In fact, as of early October this year, around 6 billion people use the internet. That number alone shows how powerful it is and how much it influences our thoughts and our brains. We’re all guilty of assuming the internet is always right and using it to shape what we believe.