In this essay, Carr asserts that the Internet, rather than Google specifically or exclusively, is in the process of revolutionizing human consciousness and cognition. For Carr, this is a negative revolution that threatens to evacuate human intellectual inquiry of its nuance, and to squeeze human interactions with both complex ideas and our own intellectual lives into a dangerously oversimplified mechanism designed only to create productivity and efficiency: two things that he sees as antithetical to a robust intellectual life.

To more impactfully and poignantly mount his argument, he implicitly and explicitly likens the Internet to previously revolutionary technological developments—most saliently the printing press. By analogizing the Internet to its precursor—a much more widely studied technology whose impact has been broadly felt and experienced over centuries—Carr hopes to lend his argument more gravity and impact. At the time of the essay’s writing (and still today), we have not seen the full impact of the Internet on human civilization. Unlike the case of the printing press, whose invention hundreds of years ago has produced scholarship and scientific inquiry into the mechanisms of the brain in relation to reading, the Internet’s full influence and impact upon the brain and human civilization has not yet been studied or understood in full.