Is Google making us stupid?

As I began reading this article I became distracted by shiny objects and <SQUIRREL> long worded sentences. The article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicolas Carr is rather lengthy. During my perusal of this I checked my email 3 times, updated Facebook twice, and re-posted several meme’s. While all this was going on, Fox News was spewing tabloid news as if it was real, or important. Twitter was afire over Arizona’s lack of common sense concerning recent hate sponsored legislation and Honey Booboo was proclaiming her mom’s current honeymoon the best ever. One wonders how many she’s been to. Meanwhile, CNN sent a Breaking news text letting me know that there was no breaking news at the moment. I had to stop what I was doing and SKYPE my wife the good news. Fortunately I was only driving to the grocery store so there wasn’t a lot of traffic to distract me from texting.

The moral to my last paragraph is that in this day-and-age, we are bombarded with information. We are forced to “skim” information simply to filter the information presented to us. When I find an article or paper that requires my deeper attention, I read the abstract to make sure that it is relevant and then I check the source for validity. Personally, I will print the article that I need to read so that I can highlight portions of the article. It also makes it easier to make notes in the margins when it’s a hard copy. The Internet lends itself to a fast pace “instant” gratification society such as ours. Everything designed for the web is abbreviated, abridged, or shortened. A special abbreviated language is used in text and chat rooms to make communication easier and certainly faster. By design, that’s how the Internet works, and for the most part this is a good thing.

So the question posed by the title of this article has no easy all-encompassing answer. For me, Google is merely a tool similar to all the other data bases I use to achieve my quest for information. So the answer in my case is NO!

References

Carr, N. (2008). Is Google making us stupid? Atlantic Monthly 302(1), 56-63. Retrieved February 18, 2014 from EBSCOhost Religion and Philosophy Collection.