Earlier this year Tara Brabazon, a professor at the University of Brighton, argued that the Internet is producing a generation of students who survive on a diet of unreliable information. "Google is filling, but it does not necessarily offer nutritional content," she said. Google, white bread for the mind?
Nicholas Carr, a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, goes one step further, questioning whether Google is in fact making us stupid.
Quote:
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
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Full article (careful, long read
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I admit I am an Internet junkie. Man, I wish it was different. Ten years ago, I went to the library and studied dusty books to seek knowledge. Back then, the mere act of doing research was by itself a rewarding experience for me. Today, I enter a single keyword in Google or Wikipedia, and seconds later, answers pop up (hopefully condensed in a few words). Good answers? I don't know. I am afraid Mr. Carr is right: something has changed, and I don't think this something has made me any smarter.
[via
Infothought Blog]