Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Should we blame Google since it is making us stupid?

After the famous reviewer Nicholas Carr wrote a article ”Is Google making us stupid?” on “the Atlantic”, so many people came out to discuss about this opinion. Carr said” what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.” Nowadays, more and more people cannot keep their eyes concentrating on an article, which exceeds 1000 words, not even a book!
However, I think those scholars and experts are not really concerned about the problem of concentration, indeed Carr had did a very careful analysis about the search behavior, but the task of parsing the information, which is done well by Google. Google just simply stores the huge amount of information that already exists, reorganizes them, and finally makes them available to everyone in the world. Google never replaces the human being for thinking. That one is not smart is not because that he/she relies on Google. If Google doesn’t exist, he would still be stupid as usual for the reason that he/she might just ignores the ability of his/her brain and will not try to think. Assuming even many materials and seasoning are placed before an awful cook at hand, he merely knows how to pour the egg into the pan and add a pinch of salt. Don’t hope him will make a better dish. So, I agree with Bonhoeffer who thought silliness is a limitation of morality; it has nothing to do with intelligence or Google...
Google ,now, is ten years old. Nobody knows its future. Like an article said:” Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds.” Google really didn’t perform badly when referring to eliminating the monopolization of information and helping people to obtain knowledge more and more conveniently.

1 comment:

Sumi said...

Excellent food for thought.
I agree with Wen Yue that net should not be blamed for making people stupid. In my opinion it is still not a good substitute for a book, a journal article as it lacks the flow one needs to solve a problem or answer a question. Google if like a book could list out results for a query in the order of history, current trends and future work (just for example) would be a threat to a lot of print media. But it has a long way to go.