I read the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” and I thought that it was very interesting because it is so true. The internet has become this vast source of information just waiting to be found with a few clicks of your mouse. Instead of researching as our parents did, using the library, with just one click we can access many libraries that include books, articles, periodicals. Basically anything we could ever need to find information on a project, paper, or math problem can be accessed all from the amazing internet. My question is, are we becoming too dependent on this one main source of information? When you have a question to answer our first thought is to have google find the answer for us. We just type in a question, and google in .253 seconds has found 3,967 results that pertain to what we are questioning. I think that we trust the internet too much to give us the correct information. Just because it is on a website doesn’t mean that the information on the website is completely true. Anyone can make up a website and put whatever they want on it, they can make it look really important and professional but what does that really do. Also, as the article states, I have been losing patience in reading longer pieces of writing. Even the article itself I wanted to skip whole paragraphs to find out the main point. It really took me a while to stop skipping and really read every sentence. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about media, states that, “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader. What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?” Scott has a good thought about how we read on the internet has an effect on our brains and how we think. We start to use google and the internet as a means of instant gratification. We need an answer and google provides that. What also comes to mind when reading this article is that commercial about bing.com about information overload. We don’t really know it, but so much information is being processed when we go on the internet. I think that the bing.com commercial is a great way to describe what has started happening when “google” became not just a search engine but used as a verb in our day to day lives.
link to bing.com commercial:
