pancake people in a syrup named google

So, is Google really making us stupid? According to Nicholas Carr, Google, or the Internet more or less, really has altered the way our minds work.

I, like Carr, am used to sitting down and reading books and articles in magazines no matter their length. However, I have found that over the past few years or at least the time period that I have been an internet user, I rarely find interest is just sitting down and reading, and would prefer to read things over the internet in a ‘condensed’ form. It is like the world has become so fast paced that we don’t have time to read through pages of information in books like research used to require. We don’t just read a book to gain knowledge about something that interests us, when we can ‘Google it’ and come up with 500,000 hits that can sum up the info, or so you believe, in a few paragraphs. Why waste your time, right? The Internet has made obtaining information, communicating, and everything in between require less work and a lot easier.

That’s not to say that people don’t read anymore, because Carr feels as if we do in fact read more than previous generations due to the different mediums where writing or text has become available. The difference is the type of reading. The type of reading and thought process books require differ greatly from that of the Internet. Carr refers to a research by a group of scholars at University College London when demonstrating that the way readers think, write, and read has changed from traditional ways in that they simply skim text versus thoroughly reading and understanding. The minds of the readers were scattered as they jumped from site to site, collecting bits of information, and then going on to a new source. This seems to say that the basic facts have become more important rather than an actual understanding.

To have no real knowledge about a lot of things does a person no good. To be wide and thin, like pancakes as it is mention in Carr’s work when he refers to a quote by Richard Foreman, or to have no fill of information except the vast network that the Internet supplies, yet still no understanding for this information could indeed be impairing the human mind. Google may have not been intended to make people ‘stupid’, but by people consistently using Google and other search engines of the Internet to ease any workload and get things accomplished quicker and easier, is hurting them.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google