Google Case Study

The answer to whether or not Google is making us stupid depends on each person. I personally feel like it is making us a bit lazy. Carr states this in a passage "The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas." I must agree with this passage, because when you are online searching for information, you deal with many popup which can be very distrustful. While reading; your mind may wander off in a sense that you can't put the text down because you want to know what's going to happen next. You may even day dream of the next event that's going to happen in the book. The internet just ruins all the excitement that you can get out of reading. And who's to say that the information we all read online is even true, because anyone can post online about anything. This is where we would need to do more research to make sure we are getting the correct information but many don't use this skill and just go with the first they see.

I already don't have a very good attention span when it comes to reading. So honestly I have loved the fact that I can use the internet for my research. All I have to do is type in exactly what I'm looking for and poof its right in my face. So I can see where Carr is coming from when he talks about his attention span has changed since he has been using the internet more. Carr describes this change by saying, "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski." I think this is a very good analogy, now days the libraries only use to many of us are to use the internet. I remember when I was younger and I would go to the library to look through many books, encyclopedias, etc to do research for my papers in school. Because this is how many of us were taught to do. Now we are having more and more computers classes to teach us how to surf the internet, etc. This is enabling many of us when we get to college and the Professor wants us to go back using the older ways of research. Many of us have become so lazy from the internet, that some of us may feel like searching all this different books is too much work.

The question of whether or not Google is to blame for our stupidity is not that simple at all. Google has helped us in many ways, for instance getting things done in a timely fashion is a plus. The society has changed as a whole because we have so much to do day to day that everything is done in a rush no matter what it is. Granted because of the internet reading is not a necessity anymore