Google, the world's new best friend and the mind's worst enemy. The article assigned to us was entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and revolved around whether or not google was in fact making us dumber. Personally I feel that it has lowered the attention spans of countless amounts of people including myself. Think of the commercials from the new search engine developed by microsoft, "bing". Their entire advertising campaign is centered around the idea of search overload". This, I feel, is the perfect explanation of what google has done to people. It has merely overloaded our minds with infinite amounts of useless information. "The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing", this quote from the article exemplifies how from being shown so much information at one time our minds can no longer focus on one single thing for too long. We now want to jump from one piece of information to another and continually find a new link to click on. I can honestly say that more time I spend trying to accomplish an assignment on my computer the less I get done. This is because I'm constantly on the internet either on aim or facebook and just randomly looking for something to do online. I will say the internet is an extremely useful tool and google have saved my life so many times on projects but I cannot say that it has made me smarter. It has merely kept me from keeping focus on everything that I do. All google truly does is show us countless links to different things which most times do not have to do with what we searched for. This is why people lose focus, because they are overwhelmed with possibilities and links to totally unrelated sources.
Also, one last thought on google. It is impossible for google to make us smart in the first place because we do not learn the information which we may find. Google does the thinking for us when it pulls up related links. All we do is sit there like lumps and read what is fed to us. I hardly find that as learning or even remotely beneficial to anyone. All we are doing is reading what is handed to us, often there is no understanding f things that we find because we do not need to know about them. It is through these useless pieces of information that our mind can now no longer focus. It just wants more. Since we are spoon fed so much information our mind cannot process it all at one time and we therefore lose focus on what we are doing. These actions repeated so many times will cause people to naturally continue to lose focus because they just want more. This is why in the article they mention how more and more people are moving away from reading longer novels. Simply because they lose focus after so much time because of the fast paced and ever changing world which the internet and google has brought to us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSkaTcjDIMk
Here is the link to one of the commercials from bing. It perfectly exemplfies search overload in everway.
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