Reading Connections #1
Garrett Burns: Google and the Internet
Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” article is easily relatable to any moderate computer user today. He poses an important question that I think deserves attention from today’s society. Although I do not agree that Google is the only contributor to making us collectively more stupid, I do believe that it can be held partially responsible for a global change of thought processing and how we obtain information. As stated in Carr’s article by Marshall McLuhan, while referring to media such as Google: “They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.”
So, is the way in which we process information being altered? In retrospect, this concept seems rather plausible. With the unlimited amount of Internet sources available for the general public, our “need” for instant gratification is becoming more prevalent. We will “skim” a site in search of a certain piece of information. Once we are satisfied, we will move on to another site in search of another piece of information that interests us. I believe that this process of absorbing information is rubbing off on other aspects of our lives. Tasks such as reading, writing, and even attentiveness during conversation are becoming more of a struggle for me and many others.
Although Carr states “We still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition,” the effects are becoming increasingly recognizable and noteworthy. The best solution, in my opinion, is for us to put effort into writing and reading through books without interruption, instead of relying on the Internet as our source of information.
Also, here is an interesting video on the expected future of the internet and some proposals on how to make it more legitimate. With the changes suggested in this video, a new kind of internet appears to be on the horizon; a type of internet which may provide only valid information to browsers. This modification could even hinder the foreseeable problems that Google and other web pages have created for focusing and learning.
Works Cited
http://2008scientificrevs210-03.blogspot.com/2008/09/course-readings.html
Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The
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