Carr Safeguards us from Evil

Clifford McKeon

                One of the most fascinating chapters that I have stumbled upon in The Shallows by Nicholas Carr is chapter eight “The Church of Google”.  It’s been the only chapter I’ve been able to somewhat focus on in this entire book.   When you think of the internet you think of all the information that you can access in a second. What really slipped my mind was the major impact of Google and other search engine sites on the internet.  The internet is an extremely complex tool without search engines. For example looking for a site on Einstein. There are thousands of them out their but without the exact name to type into the address bar the internet then becomes more of a hassle than a convenience. Besides that, Carr set up this chapter in a fashion that I thought was interesting. It goes the past of Google, Google’s future, and then some information that is supposed to scare the reader and support Carr’s views on how the internet is supposedly harming our minds. Although I do not agree with all Carr’s viewpoints, there are a couple of aspects of this chapter that I want to discuss.  

                One of the two main aspects of this chapter that stood out to me was Carr’s distasteful attitude towards Google.  One reason why I believe Carr has some strange dislike towards Google is his constant bashing of Google throughout this chapter. A part of this chapter is about Google’s attempt to digitalize lots of books and put them online to make searching and reading books more efficient. Carr spends very little time discussing how this would be useful and focused a larger portion explaining how Google preformed copy right infringement and the difficulties that writers faced attempting to sue Google. He ends the chapter with this one quote that really stood out to me as a reader, "What disturbs me about the company's founders is not their boyish desires... but the pinched concept of minds that give rise to such a desire(176).

The second aspect of this chapter that I wanted to talk about was Carr’s attempt to make Google look evil and harmful. I will admit that some of the information was concrete and he was able to back it up some of his views as to why Google is harmful. For instance the way our brains are rewired to talk and understand different languages like computer or Mathematical talk.  But other parts seemed like attempts to connect with human fears to support his position. Near the beginning of the chapter, he talks a little bit about Google’s future and attempt to make a perfect search engine that they will hopefully be able to make next 300 years. He then links it to HAL and hopes that it won’t have a bug that ends up killing all the people. Truthfully, I think Carr was hoping the demographic of those who read this book would consist mainly of computer fanatics. This demographic may closely be related to include the typical science fiction movie goers who would have seen the misuse of artificial intelligence time and time again. I believe that Carr uses these Hollywood icons such as HAL or the Terminator to install fear and mistrust of Google as a side note to overall get the feeling that almost everything done through the internet is bad!