Remeber when...

Is Google making us stupid? Short answer: yes. Long answer: Sort of. Ok, I really don’t have any evidence or even ideas on how to support that, but Nicholas Carr does. Although he may seem pretty skeptic at times, I think he’s earned that right. His research all sounds valid and he argues that extended time spent using the Internet will eventually affect cognition. He’s arguing that the new ago of technology and the explosion of the Internet is changing the way humans think. He uses the example of a research paper taking days to compile all the data, whereas now those days spent in the stacks are turned into minutes at the computer thanks to a friendly search engine called Google. Another metaphor he used that I found interesting was “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” when he was referring the fact that his mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it.

The Internet is a powerful tool that has almost endless options. Carr notes that it’s making other technologies obsolete. He says, “It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV” and that does not sit easy with me. Call me old fashioned, but I like listening to the radio, walking down to the end of my driveway in a bathrobe to pick up the Sunday paper, and talking to my grandma on the phone while she’s in Florida for the winter. Our class is an example of this; we spend so much time on Facebook that it has become our postal service and outlet for what’s going on in our social lives. What happened to calling your best friend to see what you missed while you were on vacation. I hope the Internet stops taking away what some would consider outdated technology because it’s all a part of history. Its a part of who I am, a part of who I was growing up, I had an old typewriter in my house that was given to my brother and I by our dads friend. I remember lying on my bonus room floor with my dad sounding out words to learn how to read. I can’t imagine trying to teach a kid how to read off of a kindle or a computer screen. The feeling I got when turning the page after comprehending it was better than anything else I had experienced in my short life. Taking that experience away from a kid would be like taking the marshmallows out of Lucky Charms, it’d just be a bowl of oddly shaped cheerios. The physicality of objects is what has made up our media sources for decades, changing that just wouldn’t seem right.

            What’s next if the Internet takes over media outlets? Artificial Intelligence. Yea, the super computers like mentioned in this article, I,Robot, and Eagle Eye. Isn’t that scary? Computers shouldn’t be able to think, let alone think what us humans are thinking. Google is trying to develop some sort of supercomputer that accomplishes all this however there are two fatal flaws in my eyes that were stated in the article. In Google’s world, “There’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.” This would create the assumption that “The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.” Well all I can say to that is, if the brain is an outdated computer, does that mean that we as a race are outdated as well? To close I’d like to readdress the question in case anyone is lost. Is Google making us Stupid? Not yet.