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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?"
This sounds so much like old teachers fretting over the use of calculators in math class.
In some ways, the scale of it is different, and it will be interesting to see how a kid born in 1995 thinks differently at 30 than one born in 1975, but still.
The net gives us all of the knowledge of humanity at our fingertips. It frees us from thinking about facts and gives us more time for abstract thinking and problem solving. At least for those of us who remember a time before google. Maybe a child born today really will be made dumb by google.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem
Wish I had access to the original Atlantic Monthly article, although all I could get at was the blog. Anyone else find a link to the original source?
... or perhaps it's merely a desire to have access to information just in time?
The internet (and to a lesser extent, Google) could be making us stupid
There is so much information out there, it's rapidly becoming impossible for me to read "all the classics" in my leisure time. So the answer is to make a machine do it and just access the information just in time.
I don't know if it's making us stupider or merely more boring or even, perhaps, more effective at a specialized skill while lacking breadth?
If it's making us stupid you should at least be able to provide evidence that we are worse at academics than we have been prior to the internet. I'm sorry but claiming the youth are no longer interested in the media that mattered to prior generations just doesn't cut it.
I'm sure I'll bitch that my son doesn't read every Philip K. Dick book or Ray Bradbury short story when I'm long in the tooth. I think it would be unfair to claim that makes him stupid, however.
My work here is dung.
On the one hand, Google is reducing my desire to learn. When I can just look it up at any moment, I'm not really trying to memorize it.
On the other hand, Google has brought me into contact with exponentially more information than I would have otherwise had. Pre-internet, we just used to believe the person deemed most knowledgeable on the topic. Post-internet, we now look stuff up to settle disputes of knowledge. In fact, some of the stuff we all 'knew' then was wrong.
If any of this information is 'sticking' we're probably smarter because of it.
I had forgotten how tedious it was to do research before there was google and other library databases until I saw the 25th anniversary showing of WarGames on AMC last week. The kid is tryign to break into an account and researches the account-holder's in the library life for clues. I spent many of a college evening in the library during my college years doing that.
I think its much more important with what you do with your raw material afterwards than how painful it was to obtain the materials. I'd prefer a studing to write a novel critical review of 2 or 3 major conflicting sources rather than some weak regurgitation (or direct copy) of a large number of sources.
If nobody remembers the "facts" anymore, then how is it to be judged that the "facts" in the intarwebs are true? .. Of course, history has always been written in biased fashion, so I guess there's no change there. The sad thing is that Internet, at least theoretically, provides us the opportunity to change this; having differing views of history on the record more easily.
Whether that will happen or not, remains to be seen, of course.
The internet is NOT making us smarter - it's simply making the underlying truth more evident:
The ability to successfully process and analyze information is far more rare than the ability to regurgitate facts. Now the the internet is decreasing the need to memorize mounds of facts, the people who got classified as smart simply because they were able to memorize gobs and gobs of useless facts are no longer as valued. So we're left with the subset who could actually process, analyze and synthesize information to begin with.
Good points.
Here's the old adage: You know how stupid the average person is? Statistically, half the people are more stupid than that.
Google might shape stupidity in new and different ways, just like literacy did back in an earlier day. But whether most people are saying "I heard it in the marketplace", "I read it in the newspaper", or "I googled it" doesn't much matter: the intelligence divide will continue to separate those who make decisions based on what some authorities say from those who make decisions through their own critical thinking.
The important thing is whether Google is becoming a catalyst for changing the compounds of administratium that we all have to deal with. The amount of administratium in the local universe appears to be constant for human scale time periods, but if Google is increasing the rate at which administratium oxides ("corporate rust") are converted to more reactive compounds of the element, then the upper quartile of intelligent people need to take notice, and make appropriate adjustments to the strategies and tactics that they use to guide the administrators.
I think of the internet as one gigantic brain. As your finger touches a hotplate for the first time, you mentally register "hey, that's hot, don't touch." As someone posts, say, a recipe online for the first time, the collective (or at least those who find that information relevant) will be able to recall it using its prefrontal cortex known as "Google" whenever they want. I think that we have much more access to knowledge now. That doesn't mean we're smarter, but that we can allocate our memory for what we feel is more relevant. In the process, we leave the (subjectively) less important material online where we can search any time we want.
Google can encourage mental habits where people can talk about subjects that they do not understand.
This was covered in one of Feynman's semi-autobiographical books, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! There's a bit where he goes to Brazil. There, in the science classes, the professor would call on the students, and a student would stand and deliver the answer right out of the textbook. This bothered Feynman somehow, so one day he's looking out the window at the sun glinting beautifully off the bay, and asks the students to point out an example of polarized light. Reflected light is polarized, but the students were unable to use their memorized knowledge. Feynman's conclusion was that the science professors weren't teaching science, but public speaking and elocution.
Vernor Vinge also covers this in Rainbows End. The protagonist, a revived Pulitzer-Prize winning poet from the old days, notes that the younger folks seemed to have an inability to really synthesize knowledge and understand anything, though they could instantly look anything up through their wearable computers and talk about it.