How Google Contrasts with Poetry

       In Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," he argues that the internet, especially Google, makes us stupid because it no longer forces us to spend time researching and reading long articles and books. Instead, we type in a few words into a search engine and find what we're looking for within a couple minutes. This was shown with the study done by the University College London. They studied the ways in which people researched by reading only the first one-two pages of an article, then looked up another resource to continue looking for answers. He also compares the effects of the Internet with the effects of the invention of the printing press and Taylorism. He concludes with proof from scientific studies that the fast ways of knowledge are actually making us stupider, or changing the way we think not only psychologically but also biologically through the new formations that the neurons make to adapt to the new ways that humans live and attain information.

       On the third page of Carr's essay, he explains how the internet essentially is everything that we used to use separately but in one. For example, it is a calculator as well as a typewriter, a typewriter, a radio, and others. He writes, "When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net's image. It injects the medium's content with...digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with content of all the other media it has absorbed....The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration" (Carr 3). This relates to poetry because poetry is the different expressions of thoughts, emotions, and feelings. It recreates the image of whatever the poem tries to convey, yet the Internet and poetry contrast in a great way. While the Internet scatters our attention and diffuses our concentration, poetry is supposed to do the opposite. Poetry causes us to meditate more on what is being argued or depicted in hopes that we have connection, not a disbandment.

Did Nietzche ever go back to the style that he wrote in before the printing press or caution others about the dangers of writing by the printing press?