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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?"
do cars make people drive drunk?
do purses make people thieves?
I think tools of any kind are just there, and it is our choices that determine what happens to us. They can be good or bad - depending on what we choose to do with them.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
It seems that every piece of technology gets accused of this.
Television, Calculators, Computers. All these things have been accused of making our children stupid. Now it seems it's Google's turn.
I'm sure there are more examples, but I can't think of them, and not sure what search terms to put into Google.
On the contrary the internet makes knowing 'facts' irrelevant, no one has to memorise information anymore. It's the process of information interpretation that is becoming more important than the knowing of information.
The internet is making us smarter.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Most people lost the ability to think coherently and deeply long before the Internet. It's just becoming far more apparent now that every idiot can set up a MySpace/Twitter.
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The expertise required to advance development in many fields is becoming more and more immense, and beyond what a human brain can easily absorb in a lifetime. The Internet allows the time to acquire information to be radically decreased, which will make it possible to continue the advancement of knowledge. It would still happen without it, but I think at a decreasing pace.
To "stand on the shoulders of giants" requires an ever longer ladder.
Old people say "this new music or entertainment or technology is ruining the young". We fear this new thing.
If people were so smart before Google, they might remember when this was said about calculators and spell checkers and Elvis and moving pictures and electricity.
> as we "go online" in increasing numbers and to an increasing degree, are we losing our ability to think coherently and deeply,
Oh no. It's the other way around: people who have no ability to think coherently or deeply are going online in increasing numbers and to an increasing degree.
> preferring instead to process byte-sized information quickly, regurgitate 140-character "tweets," and skim thought?
Now that there are so many people online who are of the aforementioned variety, a great deal of "information" is created by them. Is it any wonder we have to learn to skim? If we read it deeply, our minds would be fried.
The Internet does not make us stupid. Lazy, perhaps, but not stupid. Indeed, I would say that the increased MENTAL interaction it provides makes us, in many ways, smarter and more flexible.
Also, why the focus on the tools it replaces? Is this not the way of things? Tools are used until a better one comes along. Or would the Author have us all still using stone axes or flintlock rifles or riding horseback to get to work each day?
Ultimately, the Internet is a tool and simultaneously a source of entertainment. It expands our horizons and connects us to people in new and exciting ways. What's not to love?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Stupidity is the inability to correctly reason given a set of perceived facts. Acquisition of knowledge, no matter the source, can not produce stupidity; only complacence can do that.
I was agreeing with you until the last line. People that recognize it's the interpretation that is more important will be smarter, but from what I've seen it's the quick regurgitation that's the more prized ability (on the internet of course).
when we have increased tool usage, we have started to become a less strong specie as a result. whereas our ancestors were stronger, now modern man is by no means on par with wilderness standards when it comes to strength.
are we worse for it ? on the contrary, much better. see, we have a goddamn civilization going on here.
same goes for internet. we are creating a collective , all encompassing, participation based brain that can take over the menial parts of thinking process from us. even, due to automation, physical aspects of goods production too. what we will be doing in future will be creating. creating new ways and methods that we can practice through the world wide brain, internet, and whatever physical application/appliance we have attached to it, and the computers.
is this bad ? is this going to make people weak, lazy species that only eat and get fat ?
no. by nature, mankind cannot stop. if they are free of all worries, they go find something else to do. examine how high is the trend towards extreme sports in the last 30 years that wealth and comfort throughout the world increased in levels incomparable with last 3 century's standards. people are doing stuff that would be seen as crazy, lunatic, dangerous stuff 200 years ago, as sports today.
check scandinavian countries. they have a very high quality of life, they are insured to their toes, can live on unemployment money very comfortably. and are they sitting lazy and getting fat ? nay. there are a lot of open source projects being produced and released through scandinavian countries. they are many people involved in charity work in scandinavian countries.
thats the way of life. it gets easier, and as it gets easier mankind finds new stuff to do, never stays idle or lazy.
no worries.
Read radical news here
If people used the internet to gather information and then interpreted it to form an opinion it would indeed make us smarter. Judging by the comments here and at other similar places, people don't gather information and form opinions nearly as much as they skip the hard step and simply gather opinions and adopt and regurgitate them.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
I think you're basing this on only the people who post content online, like us. There are far more people who read slashdot than post comments to it, for example. So we don't really know if most people are thinking about and interpreting the content to form their own opinions.
Developers: We can use your help.
In general you can find answers on the weirdest subjects, and in most cases what you find reflects reality, especially if you compare unrelated sources. But the internet is no more reliable than traditional mass media, it is wrong sometimes. Don't tell me you haven't ever read stuff on the internet that (from personal experience) you *know* to be incorrect. I know I have.
Personally, I prefer the internet to provide material, 'leads' if you will, but then do fact-finding by combining that info with your own knowledge and real-world experience. The internet may tell you if something is likely true, but before claiming to others it is, you should determine the facts yourself. The internet can help you with that, but does NOT hold all the answers.
This is precisely how books made us stupid when the printing press came into being. Before that, everyone figured out everything on their own and they were all geniuses. Then the printing press came around and people said, "Hey, I don't have to learn anymore because all the information is in books now."
Sorry, but this is a pretty stupid line of reasoning in my mind. But then maybe that's because Google made me stupid.
That's not to say that the net might, to some degree, worsen the problem of ADD/ADHD which I think has been made worse by television already. I can't say for sure. But does it make us stupid? I don't think so.
I can't speak for others, but since the WWW came into being, and my access to information has increased, I've been able to learn more, faster, than I ever had the opportunity to learn before then.
You still need facts for context to understand the information google gives you, and as a first-order filter on whether it makes any sense. Chocolate chip cookies are often drunk with milk. Otherwise you can be distracted by irrelevant information. Or people trying to convince you to try shrimp cookies, perhaps because they're trying to sell you special shrimp cookie sheets.
Without that background, you'll run the risk of being a Chinese "invisible idiot" who is always out of sight, out of mind. Machine translation was first attempted in the 1950s.
One thing google is very good at is exposing you to new things that can be used to broaden your knowledge, so you get a cascading effect. But you have to be very careful -- there are eddies and cesspools of groups that create their own reality (Bush is one of the best presidentz evr!) and you need that outside context to see just how out of touch they are.
This problem has existed since the first libraries -- how could you ever be sure that the book you are reading isn't full of shit? -- but people were generally only exposed to stuff on the edge of their existing knowledge. Google makes pet cats good. It also exposes younger and younger people to information they don't have the experience to judge properly.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
It applies in RL too. Part of socializing involves making references to both current events and common interests. Basically, it's worthwhile to be able to pull shakespeare quotes off the top of your head if you were out drinking with a bunch of playwrights.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
It will make stupid people stupider, since they will be able to be even more intellectually lazy.
It will make smart people smarter, since they will have even better resources at their disposal.
To quote a familiar old monster from the swamp, "It only makes you more of what you really are."
I disagree, we're getting stupidly... stupidest.... stupidmost... more dumber on our own.
'The Google' helps edumacate us dumberating peoples by allowing rapid look up of information that wasn't known.
As for 'reducing our recall capacity' I think that is a load of bull puckey. Not everyone wants their memory bogged down with trivial and possibly highly insignificant factoids.
I use Google search as an extremely high speed way to look for new information, confirm shaky knowledge and learn new things about a particular subject.
For example, I knew nothing about ATMega 8 Programmable Integrated Circuit microcontrollers a few days ago. I went straight to Google and now, 5 days later, I have ordered a handful of the PIC's in question, the parts to build my own in circuit programmer and have learned enough to begin to write my own programs in C and even a bit of assembler.
So instead of Google making us less intelligent, I would like to argue that by allowing a centralized source of not only common "minor" information that we refer to many times a day, but also being a nearly endless source of new information and knowledge, Google is actually helping us to become more intelligent and more efficient.
This signature is lame.
I wouldn't say that the internet is making us stupider, but blogs are certainly making stupid people more visible.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I've been a lurker here for years (even before I registered an account) and have only posted a handful of times.
I enjoy the comments way more than the articles (which usually suck, tbh). For any article, there are almost always some extremely insightful comments, and for me, the interpretation of those is the whole point of the site.
My telephone is my cell phone. Before that, it was nothing (no phone), before _that_, it was my land-line.
I love internet maps, because they do so much, but they don't beat my paper map when I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere.
The internet isn't my clock, my internal clock works pretty well. If I have to know the exact time, then I suppose the internet is my clock... sort of: I check my cell phone which is updated by the cell network, which is updated by some atomic clock over the internet (presumably), and I like that set up. It means I'm never more than a few milliseconds off what my servers think the time is.
Radio and TV? No, the Internet is no where close to being our Radio and TV. I think nothing will be like "our Radio and TV" ever again. It used to be everyone had a similar experience with local radio and TV, now people get to choose what they want when they want. If people switch to Internet viewing, it will be more like buying movies from the brick and mortar.
I suppose it is replacing our press and typewriter, but how does that make us dumber?
Is the concern overblown or are we becoming the Web that we created? Overblown. I still remember as much as I used to, and now I have a way to find more information about things. Google expands the limits of our potential so that we _think_ we're dumber because we finally see a portion of the vastness of human knowledge and we realize we don't know jack in comparison. Was it Socrates or Plato that said something about that? Hold on, let me check Wikipedia...