Nicholas Carr's essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," is a reflection on the negative influences which Google and the Internet have on how we connect with the world and each other. Carr seems to take this influence somewhat personally as he at once sings the praises of the internet, and how it has been a "godsend" to him as a writer, while condemning it for its sentient-like powers, "I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory" (150). Carr feels as if he losing the ability to control his own mind, not that he has lost it, but that it is changing. He believes the cause of this is the fact that the Internet has become a "universal medium for him" (151). Meaning that it acts as a conduit for all of the information that flows through his head, and it is beginning to change the way that he thinks. Carr uses the above anecdote to mimic how HAL, the supercomputer from "2001: A Space Odyssey," felt when Dave begins unplugging him. He uses many anecdotes like this in his essay, and while admitting that anecdotes themselves "do not prove very much, he does use them in order to relate to his audience on a personal level, just how significantly these changes have affected his life. He takes it a step further by also relating friends and colleagues experiences regarding internet usage, as well as provides some historical information on how "intellectual technologies" (154) have been working to change our minds for centuries. "My mind isn't going...but it's changing" (150). Carr speaks of going from a deep thinking person who would immerse himself in long prose, to a person who is easily distracted, experiences losses of concentration, drifts, becomes fidgety, and is always looking for something else to do. He relates his own experiences to his other literary friends who in turn have similarly alarming symptoms. His friend Scott Karp, a blogger, admits that he doesn't read books anymore. He speculates that reading online may have changed the way that he thinks. Another blogger, Bruce Friedman, says he has lost the ability to read more than three lines at a time, and that thinking has taken on a "staccato  quality, meaning he is beginning to think the way that he reads...in short bursts. Carr uses a few articles of research in order to help strengthen his argument that the Internet is in fact "chipping away" at his capacity to concentrate and contemplate. The first is from "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man," by Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist and author who in the 1960's pointed out that media isn't passive, that it supplies the stuff of thought, and shapes that process as well. (151) McLuhan of course was not alluding to the Internet, as it had not yet been invented