Is Google Making Us Stupid?

mjasay writes "Is Google making us stupid? Following a growing body of research within neuroscience, Carr argues that as we use the Web 'we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.' This sounds great: Who wouldn't want to have the 'recall' capacity of Google? But, as Carr writes: 'The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. ... The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It's becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV. When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net's image.' In other words, as we 'go online' in increasing numbers and to an increasing degree, are we losing our ability to think coherently and deeply, preferring instead to process byte-sized information quickly, regurgitate 140-character 'tweets,' and skim thought? Is the concern overblown, or are we becoming the Web that we created?"

Comments

Re:Both

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Here's the old adage: You know how stupid the average person is? Statistically, half the people are more stupid than that.

Statistically, this is true only if: (a) you're using "average" to denote median, rather than mean, or (b) intelligence follows a perfectly symmetrical distribution. Since "average" in casual usage generally denotes mean, and since many natural phenomena don't follow symmetrical distributions*, "half the people are stupider than average" probably isn't true.

You could have Googled this information, you know. ;)

*And yes, I know IQ is defined so that it follows a normal distribution -- thus it's symmetrical by definition. For this reason alone, it's unlikely to correspond to the actual distribution of intelligence in the population.