Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Abstract

Respondents to the fourth "Future of the Internet" survey undertook by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center, were asked to consider the future of the internet-connected world between now and 2020 and the probable innovation that will occur. The survey needed them to assess 10 distinct "tension pairs" - each pair proposing two distinct 2020 scenarios with the same overall topic and opposite outcomes - and to select the one most probable alternative of two statements.

Main Body

Although a broad range of attitude from experts, organizations, and interested institutions was sought, this survey, fielded from Dec. 2, 2009 to Jan. 11, 2010, should not be taken as a agent canvassing of internet experts. By conceive, the survey was an "opt in," self-selecting effort.

Among the matters addressed in the review was the provocative question increased by eminent tech scholar Nicholas Carr in a cover article for the Atlantic Monthly magazine in the summer of 2008: "Is Google Making us Stupid?"Carr argued that the alleviate of online seeking and distractions of browsing through the world very wide web were possibly limiting his capacity to concentrate. "I'm not considering the way I used to," he composed, in part because he is evolving a skimming, browsing reader, rather than a deep and engaged reader.(Birkerts,21) "The kind of deep reading that a sequence of published pages promotes is valuable not just for the information we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off inside our own minds.(Doidge, 21) In the calm spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a publication, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. If we lose those calm spaces, or load up them up with 'content,' we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture."(Unger,2001, 54)

 

Findings

It is clear that users are not reading online in the customary sense; really there are signs that new forms of “reading” are appearing as users “power browse” level through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for fast wins. It almost seems that they proceed online to bypass reading in the customary sense.(Birkerts,21) Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the attractiveness of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 19708 or 1980s, when television was our intermediate of choice. But it's a distinct kind of reading, and behind it lays a distinct kind of considering 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 scribe 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 encouraged by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” ...