Intellectual Technology -Pundits Ask: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Web pundit Nick Carr asks the question, "is Google making us stupid?"

There is a continuing trend in academia to try and make yourself best known through racy and controversial articles and papers. The latest, riffing off his new book entitled The Big Switch, Nick Carr will see an article of his published in the July issue of The Atlantic. There is no doubt that the article exceptional and provocative, that much is clear, but is he in any way right?

Pulling the quotes from the article in The Atlantic from News.com’s article on Carr, the author has this to say;

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable....James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind "is very plastic...The brain...has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions."

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our "intellectual technologies"--the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities--we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

Carr puts forth the idea, as does Matt Asay from News.com’s The Open Road blog that the internet, rather than helping, is going to hinder our mental progress. They believe that because everything is interconnected – mail, news, information – that our ability to retain and process information will dwindle.

Once again from The Open Road blog, Carr has this to say;

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition....The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It's becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net's image. It injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we're glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper's site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
I think though that Carr has missed a massive point, or has just decided it isn’t worth considering. There are of course statistics that back up Carr’s point. Consider that, according to the statistics, the average American reads one book per year. This of course brings together those who read none and those who read many more than one, but the stats speak for themselves.

However I would suggest that America is not a case study for the rest of the world, especially in terms of intellectual improvement and development. When you put things in to ratio, America doesn’t have a greater number of intellectuals or great minds compared to any other country. They simply have a larger pool of applicants. It is the same with the Olympic Games; America only does better because they have a larger pool of athletes to choose from.

The internet is actually helping many of us increase in knowledge and intelligence. We are learning more and more, storing that knowledge, and applying it to the way we live our lives. Wikipedia is a perfect example of this. While there is a lot of bad press and hype about the community encyclopedia, it nevertheless provides a great wealth of accurate information.

Carr’s theory could probably be shelved alongside the theory that was popular when video games first made their entrance. Everyone thought that my generation would end up slackers, with no jobs, simply because we played video games. Putting aside the fact that video games have provided an entirely new industry, I’m relatively certain I’m not a slacker or a bum, and that I’m working pretty hard.

Posted by Josh Hill.

Source link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9962935-16.html

Comments

[eileen]

Physical and psychological sedentariness contributes to 'stupidity'.

No matter how ergonomic we get, sedentariness (spending time in front of the computer), I suspect is at the root of a LOT of dis-ease ... the facts are not in ... yet.

I am certain that the looming (stupid) corporate Net changes will morph the entire (internet) culture.
http://ipower.ning.com/netneutrality2

Lucidly surfing the waves of the Net can transcend the intellect ... often I find myself swimming in an ocean of consciousness, beyond time and space, gaining a more whole-istic point of view. Surfing the Net can lead to the amplification of brain lucidity; connecting the conscious mind with the unconscious. This interconnectedness is prime ground for visionaries and free thinkers.

Google is not making us stupid. Our dependence on 'exclusivity of the known' (a sedentary mind) makes us stupid. Expanding consciousness (UNprograming) has far reaching effects on cognition and reality.

"When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net's image. "

When an expanded mind absorbs the Net, the Net is recreated in the expanded mind's image!

[Travis Lawrence]

I googled this question, and it said "No".

[rizzo]

i feel exactly what you mean. the reason i say this is because until now i haven't been able to explain more accurately the feeling i've had since say 1999. when i'm on the internet it feels like i'm entering a higher consciousness than that of my current state always rising towards an enlightened state of mind.

[Saavik]

"It injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of other media it has absorbed."

And how is this any worse than what television does? When you are on the net, to a certain extent you can learn to "tune out" the extraneous content and focus on whatever you are doing. TV includes commercial breaks, which essentially force you to take a break from whatever you were viewing and watch advertisements. The advertisements themselves, and in some cases the programs, are designed to cater to short attention spans.

In any case, I think it's just as possible that the net will improve our cognitive abilities. Consider the scenario of an email popping up while you are reading over the latest newspaper headlines. After this happens many times, you may develop the ability to stop what you are doing and read the email, then seamlessly remember which headline you were reading and pick up where you left off. This leads to increased flexibility and ability to multitask.

As far as being sedentary is concerned, any form of knowledge gathering that involves studying the works of others is sedentary. Spending all day on the net is no worse for your physical health than spending all day reading books. The key is to balance intellectual activity (of whatever kind) with physical activity.

[DougBuchanan.com]

If you do not learn how to use words that hold their meanings, such as intellectual technology, as is the case with Americans, your mind will not understand any word-conveyed concept, from those words.

That describes one of the several controlling concepts that explain why the humans are still mired deep in the intellectual dark ages, still perceiving that they can kill, destroy, deceive and rob their way to success, as demonstrated by their acquiescence to their governments, much to the amusement of the observers.

May you learn the most knowledge of the most concepts, most efficiently.

DougBuchanan.com