Is Google Making Us Stupid?

[outlander]

Thought provoking read:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google]Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008)

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.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

I happened to be thinking about this the other day. I even took a book out from the library to have some quiet reading time away from the PC. It's been a week and the book hasn't been touched yet. The pull of the glowing rectangle has entangled me something fierce. After reading this article I'm now even more determined to find those quiet moments and unplug for at least 1hr a day.

[Cynar]

I know exactly what you mean. The information storm we are exposed to would be unimaginable to someone from the 19th century. It's not surprising then the the brain has to find novel ways of coping with it. Unfortunately the normal way most people deal with it is to switch off from it totally, which is what happens when you get distracted.
The best method I've found is Sci-fi/fantasy books. I can literally sit there reading them for hours on end. Mostly because their nature is such that there is not advertising, no excessive political leanings etc. to try and spot and decode. No vested interests. Even the laws of the universe can be taken as described at face value, without excessive fact cross-checking.
Once you get yourself into the habit of it, it's a lot nicer and more useful a state of mind that the white-out that more people drop into (including me at times). If anyone's interested, the works of Isaac Asimov are particularly good Hard Sci-fi, take a little time to get into but well worth it.

As for Google. Google doesnt make is stupid, it makes us lazy. Slight but critical difference.
The big question is though, Is Google God?
God=All knowing, All seeing, All powerful
need i say more.....? :-)

Cynar