Is Google Making Us Stupid?

This was my favorite of the articles I have read so far. Nicholas Carr does a great job at telling the reader just how obsessed people are in today's age with getting what they deem "important" knowledge as fast as possible. I truly think Google is making us more stupid...but it's also making us much smarter. That statement might not make any sense, but it's true of almost everyone. When's the last time you actually read a long essay word for word? I'm not sure about you, but I always seem to skim read any sort of literature. Carr brought up how the internet is "chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation". He goes on by saying, "Once, I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." This is a terrific analogy. I find myself zipping across the surface of pretty much any sort of project, paper, or work.

I found it kind of funny how I was skim reading an article that mentioned skim reading. It's just the cultural norm. People, in general, don't have to prepare days before writing a paper. They just sit down in front of a computer, do half an hour worth of research, and start typing away. We are considered the internet generation. We don't want to wait for information because we don't have to. We just look it up on our phones and have our answer in a matter of seconds. I think a better name for our generation would be 'Information at our fingertips' generation. But is all this information that is so easy to access turning our minds into mush? It boils down to opinion.

"Oh, you guys have it so easy, when I was a kid..." The typical quote from a parent. What some adults don't realize is the job market is more competitive than it ever has been. You have to look at every problem from one thousand different angles and then make a decision. Google (the internet) is making us smarter by giving us access to an enormous source of knowledge. We just have to sort through it and use what we feel is valuable. Google is making us dumber because instead of learning certain concepts and ideas we just look them up and incorporate them into our work, or we decide to just learn the basics without learning the interesting (and sometime key) details. Is Google making us stupid? We may not know until it's too late.