Information overload

Ms. Jardine’s podcast does not make me change my stance that Mr. Carr’s article was speculator and lacked evidence to support its claims. I still think Google is not what is making us stupid. However, Ms. Jardine’s podcast changed the way I think about what information overload does to us.
The internet does seem like it is a giant organizing system for our society that just has too much information to retain otherwise. This is the main positive people in the class said about technology; it is easy to access a ton of information. Ms. Jardine’s podcast further enhanced my appreciation of that positive of technology because I see it now as a file system.
For example, my internship supervisor has a rolodex on his desk. I once saw him sift through that thing for about 20 minutes, until he realized he no longer had the contact he was looking for. Recalling that information would be so much easier for him if he had it on the internet. So I would disagree with the notion that information overload is a bad thing. We go to a Liberal Arts college and one of the principles of such is a well-rounded base of knowledge. The internet can help with that.
The one concern that Ms. Jardine did bring up that caused me to be alarmed over the negative effects technology has on our society is when she made the statement, “If we are going to make sense, for posterity, of today’s information saturated present, one of the things we will have to do is to learn how to prune the evidence and ultimately, what to forget.” This is a concern for me because I feel as if there are certain skills, not information, that should not be forgotten. It is not that people are becoming incapable of doing certain things like Carr said, it is more that certain social, etiquette and public sensitivity skills are not being developed. I still believe we can salvage those skills and they are not lost forever like Carr suggests.
It may not be such a bad thing that we lose certain skills. Maybe those socials skills or whatnot will become obsolete. Unless there is an Apocalypse we should always be able to look certain things up on the internet.
Ultimately, even if technology is ruining our society because of information overload, lack of development of social skills or shortened attention span, there may be nothing to stop it. Marshall McLuhan believes in “technological determinism,” or the belief that technology changes society as much as society changes technology. Therefore, at this point, the technology has as much power over us and we are helpless to stop it.
In conclusion, I still do not believe Mr. Carr’s perspective and I think Ms. Jardine’s perceptions are much more relevant to what technology is doing to our society. Either way, because of technological determinism, what can we do?