Post by jordynperry on Aug 5, 2011 11:32:36 GMT -5
"Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think." says the author of "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", and I whole-heartedly agree. The idea that having instant access to information may be changing the way our minds work has always been one of my thoughts. Even when I was a kid, I remember being told to use a site other than google to look up information, and finding it so incredibly tedious that I left after a few clicks, deciding it not worthy of my attention. It wasn't hard to find information on the site, I remember, the instructions were clear and easy to follow, the layout was a simple one, the types of things you were looking for (magazine articles, books, sites, etc.) could be chosen without too much effort, and it didn't take a great deal longer than google did, but when the information was located it was always in an uncondensed form, and it took time to weed through and find the points that interested me. Time that I wasn't willing to take even back then.
Now computers have gotten even faster than ever, and Google is changing the way our minds work. If you ever want to know something, you don't even have to think about it any more. A tricky math question? Google it. A riddle you don't understand? Google it. How to do that weird science project? Google it. The seventeenth president? Google it. What does the leading political figure think about public school systems? Google it. Didn't read that book you were supposed to? Google it. There is no real driving processes that are necessary behind our thoughts any more. In the past we were made to be more clever, having to dig down and find out how things were on our own through books, magazines, radio shows, and a variety of other methods, but now practically all we have to do is google whatever query we may have. It's a great thing that we have this infinite-seeming store of information available to us at just a few key strokes, but it's not all at once.
As the author rightly said, "And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles." Kids who have grown up in this age of instant information seem to have lower patience and attention spans than people in the past did. Text talk is a relatively new invention (and one which still irks me) that came on with the cell phone and the Internet chat boards in general, and one which is used to compound words and thoughts down into tiny chunks. They are compounded I think, after reading this article, for the sheer fact that the less amount of type/substance there is, the more the person receiving the message is to read it all the way through and respond to it correctly.
Google is making us all more stupid, or at the very least a lot less patient and a lot less focused when it comes to thinking and tracking down information.
Now computers have gotten even faster than ever, and Google is changing the way our minds work. If you ever want to know something, you don't even have to think about it any more. A tricky math question? Google it. A riddle you don't understand? Google it. How to do that weird science project? Google it. The seventeenth president? Google it. What does the leading political figure think about public school systems? Google it. Didn't read that book you were supposed to? Google it. There is no real driving processes that are necessary behind our thoughts any more. In the past we were made to be more clever, having to dig down and find out how things were on our own through books, magazines, radio shows, and a variety of other methods, but now practically all we have to do is google whatever query we may have. It's a great thing that we have this infinite-seeming store of information available to us at just a few key strokes, but it's not all at once.
As the author rightly said, "And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles." Kids who have grown up in this age of instant information seem to have lower patience and attention spans than people in the past did. Text talk is a relatively new invention (and one which still irks me) that came on with the cell phone and the Internet chat boards in general, and one which is used to compound words and thoughts down into tiny chunks. They are compounded I think, after reading this article, for the sheer fact that the less amount of type/substance there is, the more the person receiving the message is to read it all the way through and respond to it correctly.
Google is making us all more stupid, or at the very least a lot less patient and a lot less focused when it comes to thinking and tracking down information.