Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Pretty good article on how the ways in which we receive information changes the way we think. I wrote a letter to the editor about the article which is below.


Hi Atlantic,

Nicholas Carr's article on how the internet and its tools such as Google are changing the way we think and can think hits right at home with my own dilemma in finding it increasingly hard to read long in depth books. The article discusses how other advances in media technology such as the printing press or the ability to write has changed the processes in which we think. The internet's rapid firing of information, news, and stories does change the way we attune to these sources. Two major impacts are fallouts from this information overload which the article does not cover.

The ability of having the world's information at our fingertips allows us to discover new ways of thinking and learning then was not possible two decades ago. The proliferation of blogs has given voice to many writers that not long ago would have never had a medium to share there ideas. Devoted blog readers would never had come in contact with these new information sources and would never had the opportunity to gain such knowledge. This is not a far fetched example. Think about how many times daily, weekly, monthly you come across a news article or web site that opened your mind to new ideas. In the 1980's there would be new happenstance to come across these pieces of literature. A person's information outlets were limited to their geographic locations.

Secondly, the internet allows us to learn different ways of thinking. Only having select media choices in the past, whether it be newspapers, journals, TV, etc., we knew exactly what our options were to find information. Today with the ability to search through terabytes of information only a Google away, we must come to form a new knowledge. This new knowledge is the ability to search through the masses and figure out ways on how to find the information we truly desire. Search technology is not yet able to understand exactly what we want. Endless hyperlink clicks coupled with constant tweaks of search queries is sometimes the tireless routine we endure to find what we want. Students and researchers in today's society are already overcoming this, relying on how to efficiently search online if they wish to produce results. This new education of how to search and find information via an overloaded medium, will change our thoughts and ideas differently than before. The old way of searching was reading through books, essays, and journals. The new way of searching is reviewing the links and highlighted passages which are returned to us. The neurological implications of this change about how are brain connections will differ lays the groundwork for lots of interesting research papers to come.