Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Is Google or computers in general making us stupid?

Certainly the way we deal with information, the way we read, and our expectations have changed. Spelling is no longer very important at all.

Is it true that "as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence?"

Fascinating article, although long-winded as we nowadays tend to read it bits and bites, in The Atlantic by Nicholas Carr: Is Google Making Us Stupid.

Thanks to Morty Schiller for the heads up!

Comments

[Business Writing]

Yes, I am being reprogrammed by the mind-jumping on the web. Perhaps this explains why newspapers are dying. Certainly, pretty soon we will communicate only in 140 characters...and will argumentation and presentation of complexity die?

[Mordechai Schiller]

Hi Ted!

Remember the research on Sesame Street killing kids' attention spans? All those kids are now Internet geeks!

I think Neil Postman nailed it years ago. In 1985, he wrote a book (with the best title I've ever seen) on the toxic effects of TV: "Amusing Ourselves to Death" http://www.answers.com/topic/amusing-ourselves-to-death

Then, in 1990 (eight years before the founding of Google) he gave a speech titled "Informing Ourselves To Death"! http://www.frostbytes.com/~jimf/informing.html

We were warned. We didn't listen.

Morty

[Joelchrist]

Yeah! I agree with you..sometimes artificial intelligence of computer have broken our knowledge and causes mislead in something.

[SoCal Private Investigation]

I think texting is doing much more harm to spelling than blogging or well presented websites. If anything, I find it very unprofessional when a business site is full of typos.