iSurprised

                The informative essay iWeb by Nicholas Carr, as you can infer from the title, is a reference to the futuristic movie iRobot. This movie is about a population of robots that humans create with artificial intelligence to do all sorts of tasks for humans, but their minds eventually cause them to try to take over the world. This article is not quite as extreme as iRobot, but it does talk about how the internet and World Wide Web are constantly adapting to the human mind in order to make processes easier for humans. As the author points out many times throughout his paper, by use of many questions, the audience can see that many people believe the internet has already started to become similar to an artificial intelligence. With the case of google, the search engine contains a “page-rank algorithm” that ranks every website based on the amount of times the website has been linked to, the greater the amount of links to a site the better. Google practically thinks for you using this program, where the internet thinks which page would help you find what you are looking for best based on the general popularity of the webpage. Carr does a good job of using prickles, such as specific examples of the internet evolving ( the Mechanical Turk) and many quotes from industry professionals, to prove the points he makes about the internet. The only time I found his strategy of overloading with facts to be ineffective was near the beginning when the facts seemed to all be saying the same thing and near the end when the amount of knowledge being presented to you was just too much to handle. However, this technique does work well with his target audience, who are the tech wizards and internet enthusiasts who think that the internet is amazing. The internet is amazing but his audience needs to see the hard prickles of his argument to believe what the author is saying. I enjoyed this article for the most part because I found the topic easy to relate to but I thought the prickles could have been balanced out more by goo.