Is Google making us dumber? Have you
ever noticed that when you are on line you always pick the first of second
website that they have for you to click on? Or that if Wikipedia is available
you normally will read that and get most of the information that you need? On
the surfaces you would think that Google would be doing the absolute opposite.
It
would seem that since there is such a vast amount of information available to people
to read and to gather that they would be becoming smarter than ever before.
However sadly it seems to be doing the opposite. The main reason that this is
so is because people have stopped digging for information and just pick up what’s
on the surface. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along
the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”(Carr 59). I know from personal expierence
that when I look up something on the web I only will look at usually the first two
entries on the webpage. I feel that I can get all of the information that I need
from the first two entries. After reading this article by Carr I feel that I am
wrong in my research practices. We as a culture have really almost lost our ability
and drive do deep research. Carr feels that we usually skim everything for the
main points. This seems to have made the research process lack in many
different ways. Much of the best information that people used to get for their research
was usually stumbled upon when looking for something else. Now that there isn’t
very much stumbling upon any more people have reduced their research skills to
skimming the first two articles and entries off Google and feeling that since
they even tried to do some amount of scholarly work that they have accomplished
their goal. If you dig deeper on to the third and fourth page of information
sites on Google you might start to find scholarly articles and journal entries.
I don’t want to say that Google has made us dumb but it definitely seems to have
made us lazy in our research methods.
Bibliography
Carr, Nicholas. "Is
Google Making us Stupid?." Atlantic. July 2008: 56-69. Print.
I too think that Google has made us lazier about our work. One of my professors here, asked us in class one day, how many of us actually went to the second page, after making a Google search. Maybe one person raised their hand, which just reinforces the fact that we do skim through articles, and tend to just pick the ones that first pop up. This isn't good, especially because (like we talked about in class) the first links might not be valuable sources. Like you mentioned, the deeper one looks, the more scholarly or journal articles they could find. And I think we also need to remember that there can always be a counter argument to any topic.
ReplyDeleteDerek, I really liked your post, especially when you pointed out .. "It would seem that since there is such a vast amount of information available to people to read and to gather that they would be becoming smarter than ever before. However sadly it seems to be doing the opposite."
ReplyDeleteI feel that is observation is completely accurate. We have the potential to gain a great amount of intelligence with all of the information available to us. We could benefit from it in a huge way, but we need to learn to take advantage of it instead of being lazy with it, as you pointed out.
I couldn't agree more. It is definitely making us lazier which in turn doesn't allow us to achieve our full potential mentally. I am not saying that I don't love google and the internet for that matter, but when you think about it, it is hurting while helping. Great blog.
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