The Atlantic is doing a great new thought promotion campaign called “Think. Again.” While looking through the dark images of bright neon signs outlining provoking questions I could not help but be drawn to one in particular:
…Makes you think doesn’t it?
I’m going to have to go with yes, google is making me stupid. Or at least, not as smart as I could be. And I could get into my definition of smart, and how google breeds laziness, and that there is no real reason to think hard about topics or remember facts about issues when in 0.12 seconds google can have 500k websites that will place the information on a silver platter for you. But i do think you should read the article. Maybe the term stupid is too harsh, and you want to argue that in fact our methods for consuming content are just changing and our attention spans are adapting to their fractured stimuli. I guess there’s a case there too.
Before google, if we had a question we had to go out and search for answer. Usually finding the answer consisted of a trek to the local library, a whirl through my mother’s Encyclopedia Britannica collection or simply asking the right person.
While google has definitely made us lazier in the sense that we no longer have to use our legs to find an answer, in a way I feel it makes us a little smarter. No longer do we have to sit and figure out a way to answer a question. We can simply type our query and find the answer. Google makes finding answers easy, which in turn means we are learning at a much quicker rate.
My little brother is a sophomore in high school and used to constantly flood me with questions. Now I tell him, “Google it.”
From the golden gates of google’s homepage, we are linked to world news, politics, sports and the latest trends in designer shoes! We have access to people and tools that we can use to build relationships.
We are now in a day and age where we have knowledge at our finger tips, it would be crazy not to take advantage of it.
What Google and the web is really doing is changing the definition of what knowledge is. Being knowledgeable is now moving towards more about understanding how to find information than it was about retaining it. We’re moving towards the concept of a hive mind, where if one of us knows something we all do too.