Is Google making us stupid?

I was going to post this article but seen that it was alread post when I did a search!

Here is my synopsis and root meaning of the article. I heard a two hour discussion on the radio about it last night! You gotta love radio vs. television.

The root meaning of this article below is that people are spending so much time skimming the internet for information (i.e speed reading) and not reading the whole text that they are becoming stupider by knowledge in stead of smarter from the internet.

This day and age with information at your fingertips, beginning able to find information that collaborates your opinion does not make that information correct or that you are intelligent to begin with. It is just so simple anyone can do a search, but most people are not absorbing the information that they find. They simply are waisting their time by skimming and forgetting.

Now people are losing interest in quality reading altogether and are not learning at all or enjoying a well written Novel. As one guy said here on ATS, "I read five books a day after a trip to the library!" It is so obvious that this person is not enjoying the book but just skimming over it to build the read book count!

I'm noticing more and more magazines and newspapers posting shorter more concise articles with added images and diagrams. Words seem to be expendable. Even Time magazine now have the two pages with news from around the world and the layout is like a website with one or two lines and a photo/graph. I've noticed it in a sports magazine which I love for it's well-researched intelligent articles and they've started a news briefing of a few lines. It's like journallists in print are cutting their work down because they know that people are so used to reading snippets of articles before moving on.

Great thread, Yossarian! I think the internet has changed and is changing the way we think, though I'm not convinced it's making us dumber.

So many good points have been brought up and I want to address them all, all at once, with links to related information and pictures and quotes and YouTube movies and....

One thing that was mentioned is the "scan-reading" statistic. It's interesting, because it's a technique I learned to deal with books, not Internet reading, so I don't consider it internet-specific. Seeing only 28% of most pages doesn't, in my opinion, mean you're getting less information as long as you process enough to stop and read 100% of the relevant ones. Some one else gave a really good example of how scanning works for me, too (I forget who it was, sorry).

I returned to college last year, 15 years after I first graduated. I have discovered something I never expected: I prefer to read my textbooks online now. I don't have to deal with the weight, or torn pages, or having four fingers in the book as I refer back and forth between the glossary, and an illustration, and the part I'm reading, and a related part from several chapters back ...

In that case, the internet (and the model of information-seeking it has enabled) is improving my ability to assimilate information.

Literature, I still prefer to read in book form.

I confess to adoring Google (and other search engines that I use for particular subjects), and I consider myself to be very proficient with it. That's one of the keys, I think. And I really hope that it's being taught in schools today, because I doubt they still teach the skills (card catalogue lookups, bibliography searches, Social Sciences Citations Index searches, etc) that gave me the skills that I now use to weed through the Google results. Because often, if I just use a one-word search, I won't get a really good source until several pages into the list.

One way that I think the internet has definitely changed us for the better is that it gives us the feeling that we can find things out for ourselves. The skill level might not be up there yet, but I believe that will grow as the new ways of thinking are shaped. It means that we don't have to accept what one "authority" tells us, because we can search the Internet on the topic and have instant access to authorities who see the matter differently.

In a way, I think the attention problem could be compared to someone who, having spent his life with only one book, is suddenly let into the Library of Congress. Of course it's hard to focus at first, when there's so much to explore.

But I think that as humanity adjusts to our new technology, we will preserve spaces in our lives and minds for examination also. I think people need those spaces.

The only thing that really concerns me is that we are losing our ability to differentiate good information from bad information, since we can no longer tell much of anything by its packaging.