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Making Us Stupid?

Entry 792, on 2008-06-11 at 18:50:13 (Rating 2, Computers)

Is Google (and the Internet in general) making us stupid? Its a question asked by an article I found today on the web (not as a result of a Google search, by the way). The claim is basically that searching tends to provide short snippets of information which people quickly browse before going on to the next thing.

There is some truth in this. That article itself was quite long and I only skimmed it myself, so that does support the point they were making! But I did read most of it before going on to something else. So I get a broad range of knowledge but with less depth.

This was the whole point of the article though: that people didn't pursue anything with any depth any more. In an age where narrow specialisation has been the norm that isn't necessarily a bad thing though. I know that since I started using the Internet as my main information source that my knowledge is now far more broad.

Before the Internet I knew almost nothing about subjects like philosophy, religion, and history. I still don't know a lot about those subjects but at least I know a lot more than I did, and I don't think I would have bothered learning that stuff if good web sites (especially Wikipedia) hadn't been available.

Another point in the article is that some people have stopped reading books completely. Again I can identify with that idea. I used to read 2 or 3 books per week, now I'm lucky if I read one a month. I did listen to a whole audio book while flying to San Francisco earlier this week though, and it was on a subject I would probably never have bought as a real book: Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

So the idea that the medium of the Internet is making everyone stupid isn't necessarily true. Having a wider knowledge but less depth isn't more or less stupid than having a deep knowledge on a small number of subjects - its just different.

And superficial, short items have reached other media as well, such as TV and newspapers. This could be as a reaction to the Internet but we don't really know that for sure. It could be that all media (including the Internet) are just reacting to what people actually want.

And this was offered as evidence of the bad trend: "[The Internet is] becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV". I think this is true, but again its not a bad thing because the Internet is very good at all those things.

I will make one last point regarding this skimming phenomenon. I might skim 3 or 4 sites to get the information I need. In the end that's probably as much as I get from reading one source completely but because I have read more than one I am more likely to get the story from several perspectives. Again I ask, how is that a bad thing?

Comment 1 (1461) by Heather on 2008-06-12 at 17:16:49:

I think the internet ends up being about a wash, stupid-wise. I'm more willing to look for random stuff online than I ever was when it came to looking up something in printed media. Satisfying curiosity is a marvelous thing. Often, I don't care if a 10-year-old could read the information I find, which is good because mostly they could. This isn't a whole lot different from encyclopedia articles, just less cumbersome.

Clever users eventually figure out how to organize the information bombarding them every time they hit their feed reader or read the news or look up ladybugs for a class project. I'd like to think that this is yet another way in which we learn critical thinking skills, but I don't delude myself that everyone hops online with that intent. With information gathering (of even watered-down information) being so easy, there's a chance that more people will give it a whirl.

Glad to see that you're enjoying yourself here in the Bay Area. At least try to steal time away from the conference for lunch outside-those sunny days in SF are rare...

Comment 2 (1462) by OJB on 2008-06-13 at 10:33:35:

The way I see it, you can't blame the medium for the behaviour of the consumer of the information from that medium. There is both superficial and in depth information in all media, including the web - how people use that is up to them. In my experience the vast majority of people are naturally stupid (or, at least, they act that way in many situations).

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