Is Google making us stupid?

 'Is Google making us stupid?' is an article that highlights the arguments some students have been presenting lately. I too felt in the beginning that my brain was turning into a rewired configuration of mush. But now that I have had some time to get used to it, it has rewired some more and settled into an epiphany of new thinking. Having said that, I haven't had time to read a book for a long period of time so I'm yet to find out if I still have the ability!

As the article went a bit gar gar in transit,  I have linked the URL to the title so you to go to the original article and read in peace.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Illustration by Guy Billout

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?� So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,� HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.� I can feel it, too. 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. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)[Read More]

Tags: learnin educa
Posted at 10:12PM Oct 08, 2008 by Jan Sutton  |