Wednesday, January 28, 2009

At Least Google Makes Me Sound Smart

As I'm sure that all of you read Nicholas Carr's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid," I can't help but wonder if you agree with the overall message of this writing. According to Carr, you probably only read about the first 3 or 4 paragraphs of his entire article but regardless of that, he brings up some interesting points. It is definitely an eye-opener to think about the way Google and the internet influence our lives, and to think about how we would respond to losing them. However, to say that Google is making us stupid seems a bit far-fetched.
It is definitely fair to say that our generation is conditioned to respond better to stream-lined information, and we tend toward fast-paced delivery of that information. This is evident in the way news and information is presented to us. Carr expresses the idea that this is possibly making us as a society less intelligent. He Quotes a developmental psychologist from Tufts University in saying the people are becoming "mere decoders of information." Personally, I cannot see the harm in people becoming much faster and more efficient at processing information; if anything, I see this as a benefit among the many potential problems with the way we give and receive information. The busy world we live in requires us to keep up, and it makes me nervous to think about what would happen if we decided to simply slow things down again. Though my obvious bias lies in the fact that I was born and raised into this fast-paced world, I see much more good in it than harm.
Along the same lines, Carr even reports the original scare that the Gutenberg printing press would cause people to become lazy when books and literature became readily available. I'm not even sure where to start on the notion that the availability of books could make someone less knowledgeable and studious. I do, however, know that the invention of the printing press was one of the most positive and influential steps forward that humans have ever taken, and I am unable to see how technology and the internet could be considered otherwise.
So, with the advice of Carr's article, I'll keep this short and sweet. I find Carr's article quite interesting and his ideas are, at the very least thought-provoking and I am curious how everyone else in the class feels about his notions of the internet's influence on society.

18 comments:

  1. I do believe that Carr went a bit overboard to say that google is making us stupid. Yes, it may increase our expectations of having everything readily available on-line, but we do have the necessary knowledge and tools to resort back to the library if necessary. I personally feel that it enhances our ability to become more proficient in whatever subject of interest we are intending on researching and/or reviewing, by providing numerous of informative links with reliable information. Like Life,technology is simultaneously advancing and society needs to be caught up on these technological advances so as to not be left behind. The internet does have some negative influences in society when it comes to having a lack of personal interactions with others and things of similarity due to internet features such as email or aim. However when it comes to sources such as google I dont' see it as nothing less than a benefit to our society, especially the college-age generation.

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  2. … I use Google to spell check words… in that sense it has made me more stupid. The use of search engines such as Google, besides my admitted use for it, I don’t believe is necessarily making people more stupid as the article suggests, but perhaps a bit more lazy. Let’s say for example researching a topic for an upcoming paper. You still go about the same reasoning process of searching the topic name then other key associated words just as you would do say in a library. The only difference is your butt doesn’t move from the chair and essentially with a pinky movement to the right you click enter and the info appears right in front of you. You didn’t have to wander down aisles of books or beg the librarian to help you. So “stupider”… not necessarily… more slothful… maybe so.

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  3. So this is kind of off topic, but Im in AKPsi, the professional business fraternity. Tonight we had our formal rush were we do a group interview to potential pledges. As an accounting type question in order to see how people strategize on the spot, i asked one of the guys how many ping pong balls he thought would fit into a 747... his answer: i dont know, i would just google it.
    he was serious, and didnt offer anything else as an answer... maybe it has made him "stupider"

    i just thought i would share that :)

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  5. I agree with a lot of what Carr suggests in this article. The imediate and efficient information retreiveal may in fact be a contributing factor to shorter attention spans, and a loss of the ability to analyze and contemplate complex information. It is obvious that the way in which we think is influenced by the way we use our brains, and the way online information is so easily accessible and readable may be keeping us from practicing attention, memorization, and critical thinking. I can feel the effects of the internet and word processing. My short term memory seems to be diminishing each year. Due to automatic spelling correction I have forgotten how to spell everyday words, and I find that while reading longer documents I have to start over many times because I have wandered off on some tangent. Having forgotten earlier sections of what I read, I find myself unable to comprehend a document as a whole. Although we are able to access much more information, the rapid pace that we read through it may be effecting our abilities to contemplate and retain it. I believe that the simplicity technology offers may perhaps be making the majority of us more simple-minded human beings

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  6. Here's a little aside. So earlier today there was a problem with Google. Every site on the Internet was flagged as being "harmful to your computer". I was looking something up, and when I got the error I thought I had misspelled one of the words. I tried to google ESPN and when that gave me the same "harmful" warning, I knew something was wrong. Luckily it only lasted for about an hour.

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  7. I do agree with your assumption that the printing press, books, and the internet have indeed advanced us a human race and we've been able to experience more things than ever before. I think that the internet specifically is a great medium and resource for us to use to communicate and be "more efficient" as a society. However, on the other hand, Google and the internet has allowed us to be what some may consider "lazy" with our thoughts and our work, mainly because it's not old school. Half of me likes the old school mentality though- breaking away from always "go go go" and slowing down to take pleasure in life's simplicity sometimes. With the world at our fingertips in Google, we have a tendency to just go nuts with all this information all over the place. Sometimes its a good thing, but I do think that sometimes, thats a bad thing. So maybe Google doesn't make us stupider completely, it just shifts our focus into a sometimes mindless world of endless information, forgetting all the small tings that got us here.

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  8. Because I have almost always lived in a situation where internet access is available, I lack the perspective to say that easily available information bytes have shortened my attention span. What seems to me to be the case, though, is that these information bytes are supplementing longer, more attention-intensive methods of getting information (books, longer articles, etc) rather than replacing theme. People I know who read (college students, for instance) still are able and often required to pay attention to a source of information for an extended period. At the same time, there are large populations today of people who do not read extended works recreationally and only get information from these bytes, just as there were people who did not read much before, and who did (or potentially could) not read before the Gutenberg press.

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  9. I think Carr's assertion is in part correct. I've had multiple experiences where I simply can't do any of my school work without Google. My most specific memory of this is during my French class a year ago. I was absolutely dependent on Google for both translations and grammar help. The internet in the Undergraduate Library went down and I was completely stuck. I packed my computer up and called it a night.

    I also feel like I retained less vocabulary because I knew it was always just a click away. If I had learned the vocabulary at the onset, my retention of the language would be much higher now than it really is.

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  10. Personally, I wouldn't say that we are more "stupid" so much as we are more dependent. Tools are designed to lighten the load on their users. The internet too has allowed us to leave what used to require strenuous research and memorization to a few keystrokes. Few of us feel the need to remember our friends' phone numbers these days; our phones remember for us. Many of us have stopped trying to remember our day to day schedules; that's what Outlook Calendar is for. Lots of us don't even bother going outside to see what the weather's like anymore; weather.com is probably more accurate than my physical perception. In the sense that our abilities to function without these conveniences have severely diminished, I could agree with Carr. But overall, I agree with jebarnes. Instantaneous information offers innumerable advantages on a daily basis. It's vat of knowledge allows the human user to focus its intellect more on managing information than merely remembering it, allowing for a level of productivity never seen before.

    There's an anecdote I've heard before about how two coworkers are standing by a copy machine and one tells the other, "Did you know that before this, people had to manually print documents as many times as they wanted copies? Can you imagine? Isn't this great?" Go back a few hundred years and two printers are standing by a printing press. One says to the other, "Did you know that before the advent of the printing press, monks (cuz they had the time and literacy) would sit in large rooms and transcribe everything by hand. Can you imagine? Isn't this great?" Back a few more hundred years, twenty monks are sitting in a room where they are all copying down what an orator is reading so they would have copies. One says to the other, "Verily, can you imagine what they did before this? Isn't this great?"

    I probably blotched the telling, but the point is like barnes' story: as a species, we've found success with one major innovation after another. The internet is but the heir to each of these great inventions all the way back to wall paintings and the guttural utterances of man's early languages. So look at the big picture, bub. We'll be the better from the advancement of technology, even if it makes us "dumb."

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  11. I would not go to the far extent of agreeing with Carr, as he mentions that Google has made us more stupid. I mean really?? If anything, web-portals such as google and wikipedia have unleashed our imaginations. I know people that google-whack (the game you play where you try and use a two word combination and receive only 1 hit on google) or spend countless hours on wikipedia just looking up information.

    More Stupid? Probably not, but definitely more lazy. I remember growing up and actually using a hardback encyclopedia to look up information about anything I was interested in, but now this task has become much more simple with the advent of the giant search engines.

    Dong's post above hits it perfectly in the first paragraph (where he agrees with a previous post), the technology is allowing us infinite information resources. Google's take over of the internet has been amazing, and I don't know where any of us would be without it or any of the other information applications the internet offers. We're not dumber because we have to use the tools we have to find concrete ideas (those that have been constant forever). So it's not like people always knew everything before google came along, they just had to work a tad bit harder to access it.

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  12. Carr was a little outrageous with the google making us stupid comment. I think that google enhances things that we already know and makes it easier for us to learn different things about different topics. Without google, it would take a lot longer to learn about different tasks, when all you have to do is type in a word or phrase and its at your fingertips. I can agree with Austin's statement about it making us lazy and can also say that it is not always reliable but it is a tool created by one of our own to ease us when a dictionary/encyclopedia is not easily accessible. It also combines mass information together and creates its own record.

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  13. I feel like the guy that wrote this is AWESOME!!!!! !

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  14. I think that Carr makes some valid points, but at the same time I do not think I am stupid and I use Google all the time to search for books, website addresses, resources, images, etc. I think we do rely on technological advances like search engines a lot, because like Professor Nicholas said, some students are awed by actually having to find books as sources. This makes us lazy, not stupid. I remember back when I didn't have access to the Internet, and I was fine searching catalogs for books or asking the librarian for help, but just because I don't have to do that now doesn't mean i'm not capable of doing it. I also know that I do read the entirety of articles, not just the beginning, and I think it's farfetched to generalize those kinds of statements to the general population.

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  15. In some ways I do agree with Carr. I find myself looking up applications such Drudge Report in the morning and just skimming through the headlines. I feel like I've read the news for the day and I can throw in the towel. In today's technologically savvy world, we have all become a little dependent upon speed and we are more and more intolerant to wait around and read an entire article. This is not because we have lost any intelligence we just have a shorter attention span. Give me a quick article so I know the basics and I'm satisfied.

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  16. I understand what Carr is saying about the way we retrieve and process information in this modern age; however, to say that we are becoming "more stupid" seems like a stretch to me. I think that it is unfortunate that few of my peers ever go pick up a newspaper in the morning to inform themselves of what is going on in the world. I will admit that I am one of these people. My excuse is that I simply don't have the time to read the New York Times cover to cover, and why waste that precious time when I can simply turn on my computer and find all the headlines online? Or better yet, why not just watch the Today Show or Regis and Kelly Live to get a brief overview of all the biggest stories so I can at least sound smart and informed on a day-to-day basis?!

    Ridiculous, I know, but this is where I must agree with Carr in his argument against Google, in the fact that most of us have a very broad, vague, incomplete knowledge of many, many issues/things, but we fail to take the time to really know or understand these things on a deeper level.

    However, isn't it better that "victims" of this technological era are at least utilizing what they have at hand, and taking advantage of the technological advances to improve/increase their knowledge, instead of doing nothing? I believe that, generally speaking, people have become lazier as time progresses, mainly because we can be! I don't even have to turn on my computer anymore to search something on Google, since I can now access it on my phone. I have the ability to find out anything about any one/place/where/thing right at my fingertips! Certainly this can't be viewed as a terrible development, as Carr suggests in his article.

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  17. While Carr goes overboard in his declaring that Google has made our generation more stupid, I do agree with the general premise of his thesis. It seems ever-clearer that people prefer to receive their information in small, dense packets that saves time, effort, and increases efficiency.

    We are commonly seeing more and more people make use of online news sources as opposed to physical newspapers. At least in college, with irregular daily schedules and whatnot, many people prefer to read an article when they see fit, skip around to different topics easily, and not have to skip around to read an entire story (Continued on B5...).

    The thing that scares me about this new Google-fueled, information digest generation is that young people are increasingly expectant of instant results and gratification. I think we're seeing this in the fields of science and math especially, where kids are increasingly moving away from these subjects as soon as they can. I think the reason is that in math and science people are confronted with difficult problems, ones that take more than a few minutes to complete (or even understand in some cases), and are increasingly likely to give up before the problem is completed. This is where we get an increasing majority of young students claiming that they are "bad" at math and science, when in fact they are just too lazy (or impatient, etc.) to spend time learning basic concepts and solving difficult problems. In this sense I agree with Carr, but perhaps we are simply moving into a new time when this will not longer be necessary.

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  18. I did not interpret Carr's article to suggest that solely Google is inhibiting the intelligence of society, but that the responsibility lies in the Internet and its mass information offerings. Carr frequently referenced Google because it is the most widely recognized Internet features, and one of the most developed.

    With its various products and constant evolution, Google helps me to manage the fast-paced world into which we were all born. To me, Google is not responsible for the information overflow, but it filters that abundance of content into a condensed news source that contains only the stories that cater to my interest.

    Carr is correct in suggesting that the abundance of information available is narrowing our thinking. With all of content available on the Internet, it is not uncommon for us to read only a few paragraphs of an article to understand its general gist, and those articles are often so biased that they are completely skewing our perceptions of the truth.

    As an advocate of the use of all of Google's spectacular features, I do not agree that Google is making us stupid, but Carr is correct in suggesting that our daily use of the Internet is responsible for a reduction in intellectual thinking. It is important that we all understand the limitations caused by this overflow of information, and utilize the available modern-day information resources in a way that bypasses those limitations.

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