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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?"
The Internet in general will make us sutidp.
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.
Is Slashdot making us stupid? We've lost the ability to come up with new jokes, instead preferring to spread the same old memes about hot grits, Natalie Portman being naked and petrified, welcome our new Google overlords, and saying that In Soviet Russia, YOU make Google stupid.
Oh well, I guess all are brain are belong to Slashdot.
My blog
correct question:
"are google making us stupids? is our childrens learning?"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable Slashdot 2.0.
"Is the Internet making us even more stupid?"
Dawkins Revisited: A person is shit's way of making more shit -- Steve Barnett, anthropologist.
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.
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
> Is Google Making Us Stupid?
I can't answer your question, my internet connection was down all morning.
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.
Ironically this article is on CNet, which is full of "byte-sized information", "regurgitated tweets", and "skim thought." Just another sensationalist article on a site that claims to be above the problem while actually promoting it.
Developers: We can use your help.
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
It's.. People!!!
... electrolytes!
Here's to finally giving Bush his exit strategy in November
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.
Chasing after everything they do.
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
I dunno... the internet is a source of information (and admittedly often misinformation). How and what you do with that is up to you. I like to think google has made me smarter. It's allowed me to study after the facts things my doctor has said that I may not have fully understood. Instead of buying a book to get a beef stroganof recipe, I now read a half dozen of them online to distill what is the essence of beef stroganof. When my daughter asks me what sound a moose makes, instead of "I don't know", it's now "let's find out!" I use google multiple times daily. No, I'm not stupider for it, and yes I still read books.
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.
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.
Ewe muss bee knew hear. Naw, Goooooooogle ain't be makin' us stew pod. Teh internets is makin us stew pod.
Whut iz makin uss stooopid is reading shit from people like Nick Carr. "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'" despite the fact that Carr has absolutely no credentials in the field of neuroscience whatever.
The guy's a fucking writer for Gawd sake! Wikipedia entry: "Nicholas G. Carr (born 1959) is an American writer who has published books and articles on technology, business, and culture. He was educated at Dartmouth College and Harvard University.[1]"
Guys like Nick Carr are making us stupid by writing utter bullshit thet nobody can rebut anywhere that matters.
If I say something stupid about physics on slashdot, someone with a degree in physics will set me and everyone reading my comment straight (and it happens lots, kiddies). When Carr spouts his unlearned drivel on c|net, nobody has a chance to rebut anywhere that matters unless his drivel gets on slashdot. Then kids who haven't read enough or lived enough to realise the taste of bullshit when it's spoon fed to them believe the hokum and parrot it elsewhere, lending credence to dumb "facts".
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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
Well. I dont think its making US, stupid. I think its making YOU stupid.
There is this great essay by the celebrated Sartori called "Homo Videns" written somewhere arround the 80s. In it he makes the pretty good case that when politics and, in general, most of the information we receive moves to mass media and, particularly, video, men stop excercising their capacity to abstract, translate and analyze symbolic representations of reality (letters, at their most basic and atomic representation) and thus abandon what makes us Sapiens: the ability to apply abstraction to extract information from reality and analyze it through symbolic manipulation.
He argues that images are the most concrete form of information. If you read in your red-note paper about that huge car crash, you need to imagine it. Information missing from the blurb are oportunities for abstraction and extrapolation (was the car red? how do you imagine it? was it new... was it a sports car? was the dead woman a blonde?). An image, in contrast, does not invite you to think: it invites you to accept the precise and concrete information you see in two seconds of evening news: brains splatered on sidewalk with blonde, long hairs sticking out from it, all in HDTV, 1080 resolution.
So, back to my original idea. I think whomever chooses to abandon "Sapiency", is wellcome to do so. Its not like humanity will loose anything: we are mostly ignorant assholes, only ever the elites get mildly educated and its supperb and almost very rare that people get to this state of openess and continuous learning that i like to call intelectuallity. Then again, compared with the TV, the Internet ROCKS. At least it gives you the CHANCE to keep being sapient, to keep reading and writing long thoughtful blurbs if you want. It lets you get in touch with like-minded individuals. The intenet is full of potential for this, whereas the world we come from is just the fucking TV.
So i think we were already idiots, dont go blaming my internet of that.
NO SIG
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.
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.
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 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."
Even in the summary, all these other, older technologies are mentioned. Why is it perfectly normal to use those technologies, but not this one? Didn't the printing press relieve us of having to write everything by hand, and didn't written language relieve us of having to simply remember everything? You can't be saying that written language contributed to some loss of coherence because it freed us from having to remember so much, can you?
The knowledge and coherence of humanity only continues to grow in size and complexity because of technology. It's not static. Modern technology allows us to use our innate comprehension to think about different things, or think about the same things differently, just the way that written language allowed ancient peoples to think about greater and more complex economies - since they were able to write down the exact details of trades instead of having to remember them.
This all boils down to "those damned kids and their rock and roll."
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
let me check.
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
No, I don't think the internet will be making us stupid, not when what it's replacing is TV, radio, and corporate controlled newspapers.
I've seen this argument applied to other technologies too. Eclipse, for example. A friend of mine used to say that he would never use an IDE because it was for "stupid people" and that he didn't need a programs help to find things in the application he was working on.
:)
;)
I tried to explain to him that all it did was automate the mundane tasks to make you more efficient.
In a way my friend was right. Because you use Eclipse to locate issues with your code or to find symbols or to refactor, you may lose some of the skills you acquired to do those things.
But also... you're time is better spent.
All google is doing is automating the mudane task of sorting and searching through tons of data.
So, on some level yes. But as long as you stay in practice with some things.. it should be okay. Challenge yourself every once in a while to do things the hard way.
In parting... how many of you can take a square root without using a calculator?
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Well, the sad thing is that some people actually do use Google as some kind of definitive proof. And often not even as in "Google found a peer-reviewed authority on the domain, who explained that X is true". More like if searching for X returned 200,000 hits and searching for !X returned 100,000, then obviously X is true.
We've even had an article recently which claimed you can know who's gonna win an election, by how many hits Google returns when you search for their name. And when it all broke down for Ron Paul, they just handwaved an and removed it from the sample, rather than wonder if their hypothesis is false.
Now I'm not saying that Google is making us stupid, but that IMHO stupid people unsurprisingly end up doing stupid things with it. So far.
On the other hand, maybe it is worth wondering what long term effects it might have. Calculators didn't make everyone stupid either, and even less so in the short run, but some half a century later we have a lot less people who can do even elementary addition or subtraction without one. And a lot of people who not only took calculators as an excuse to not learn their 1+1=2, but as an excuse to not learn any maths at all. Why bother, when some calculator or computer or cash register can do it for you anyway?
But the real harm is that maths isn't just about being able to sum your grocery bill in your head. Most of it is about long abstract operations with all sorts of funny letters, so to speak. Actually calculating a result for some particular values of those variables, is the least interesting part of it. But that's based on concepts and theorems, which are in turn based on others, and so on all the way to that 1+1=2 you start with in primary school. And the more you skip at the front, in the name of "bah, I'll just use a calculator for that", the less of a foundation for the whole edifice you'll have later.
In effect, it's not just that some people use a tool (well or badly, as the case may be), but that a lot of people effectively don't have the foundation to understand anything maths-related. I.e., they won't even know what an integral is, or when to use the funny tool to calculate one for them.
And in some countries already the maths and science education in school is gradually getting dumbed down, so they just avoid the issue altogether. So regardless of whether they're teh uber-nerdy genius, or the school jock, whole generations do end up knowing less when they finish school.
So I sorta idly wonder if, given ample time, Google and Wikipedia will have the same effect on, say, logic. Why bother learning to follow an inferrence and examine the premises, when you can probably just Google the conclusion later? Let's just hope I'm wrong.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In the last six months, Google has been visibly "dumbed down". Originally, Google was literal about spelling; a misspelled word would not match much. Then Google started offering hints: "Did you mean Mississippi?." Now, Google has aggressive spelling correction, and looks for the most common word close to the input word. To look for an uncommon word, it may be necessary to exclude common words similar to it with "-".
This reflects user behavior. Most search requests are incredibly dumb. Look at any list of top queries. In fact, most requests to Google don't reach the search engine at all; there's a canned set of responses to common queries in the front end machines, which cuts the load on the main engine by at least 50%. Yahoo put considerable effort into special cases for common queries (weather, sports, directions, etc.) back in 2007, and for a while Yahoo was technically ahead, not that it helped their stock any. Now Google is doing that too.
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...
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.
If you Google "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" the first link is to the same article!
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
I disagree. If someone forced you to memorize the date "July 4, 1776" as the day the U.S. declared independence, and years later you read a book written in England or America in 1778, you automatically know something about the political environment it was written in.
Having your brain say "hmmm, this happened before X or during Y" is automatic in this case. Whereas you'd have to be quite curious to go out of your way to research the historical context otherwise.
Most learning is memorization in a way - names, properties, relationships, etc. And the more framework you have in your mind, the easier it is the place a new bit in. 1778 only means "Revolutionary Era" to me, but to my history-professor brother, I'm sure it calls up tons of associations.
I think the number of stupid people with access to information and education is increasing at a rate greater than average intelligence. People are also learning differently because of the way we have access to information, and that is a smart thing to do. More scientists today with respect to their time read more than they spend time in lab. Were it not for so many books, let alone the internet, that would not be possible. There is also more to learn today than ever before. That doesn't mean scientists are doing less work, or any less smart; they are doing different work, and we can see the difference.
And in the same respect, I think more stupid kids are browsing 4chan, facebook, lolcats, and youtube that might otherwise be burning ants with magnifying glasses, sniffing glue, hitting their heads against walls for fun, and shooting the neighbors cat with a BB gun.
As the internet has brought a new type of democracy to information and education the world has changed. Smart people went to libraries, others went to the county fair (to quote Jeff Foxworthy). Now we all hang out together on the INTERTOOBS!!! GREAT!
It is better than it isn't.
I think the article is very short sighted, and ignorant to the way people learn and adapt with their technology. This possibly really reveals how ignorant 'smart' people are about those with lesser opportunity. I think a better perspective would be how we can see intellegence as a whole versus averages or medians. The internet has grown to include so many more people. Remember that the internet started with colleges and expanded into wealthy communities. We can now see just how poorly educated some of the country is. In the parts of the country that are cut off from technology, you will find AT LEAST as many people made up of sound bites. How many people do you know that only repeat one really bad joke, that is short, and poorly told? This was not something new that the internet created, they are just no longer naturally censored... And now they get their own website and a "Top 10" list on cracked.com
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
Intelligence is not based on brute calculation.
What this means is, while someone might have a better memory than another person, if they don't know the difference between right and wrong because they have no ability to weigh their own actions, they'll aways be putting themselves into dumb situations no matter what they scored on their written tests and no matter what grade they got in school.
The point is, life is the true test. If you want your kids to be smart, teach them how to measure right from wrong decisions. This means you have to teach them critical thinking and how to weigh their actions against the consequences.
This is something many book smart people are not capable of doing. They might be able to calculate and do advanced math in their head, but if they lack reasoning ability, none of this will matter.
Rational choice theory/game theory is really the only kind of math that must be mastered if a person is to be successful.
This thread screams for a reference to King Thamus of ancient Egypt who once made the same arguments against the development of writing. He argued that writing would dumb humans down.
Read Plato's "The Phaedrus" for more on this.
http://www.units.muohio.edu/technologyandhumanities/plato.htm
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!