Chief Reporter
The Engineer
There is a good argument that information is becoming way too easy to access. It’s now got to the point that when a random question such as ‘I wonder when cheese was invented?’ pops up in conversation with friends, it no longer reveals who is the biggest know-it-all but instead only shows who has the fastest fingers and best mobile connection speed. (Incidentally, according to the Wikipedia entry found by my Google search, the ‘proposed dates for the origin of cheesemaking range from around 8000 BCE, when sheep were first domesticated, to around 3000 BCE.’)
It is a worrisome thought that the Internet is becoming more of an extension – if not replacement – of our own brains. And a quick Google search shows I’m not the only one who sees this as a problem.
American writer Nicholas Carr posed the question this way in a 2008 cover story for Atlantic magazine: ‘Is Google making us stupid?’
In his new book The Shallows, which comes out this month, he reflects on the subject area even more. According to a summary of the book on Atlantic’s web site Carr compares the Internet’s impact to that of other technological innovations, including the printed book. An excerpt reads, ‘In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us.’
It’s true the amount of concentrated effort to perform a Google search is pretty much negligible and the amount of time invested in finding an answer to your search query is just about as long as you will remember that probably useless nugget of information.
But imagine if it were even easier to perform a web search by removing the interface to the Internet all together. I have often mused about the possibility of implanting a Google chip in my brain; so that instead of having to fire up my web browser and type my search query, I could just wirelessly download the answer to any question that enters my head. The data would be fed directly to my neural circuits and the results would display visually on my retina. Such a wondrous bit of technology would certainly come in handy during pub quizzes.
The downside would obviously be the difficulty in controlling the results received and if Dr Mark Gasson, from the University of Reading is anyone to believe, the potential for contracting computer viruses.
Oh and one other thing. It’s just freaky.
Google, in its traditional form, does serve a purpose. After all, we can’t be expected to know everything in the world and when information is desperately needed the World Wide Web is an efficient first source. Any journalist will agree.
The problem with becoming so dependent on such a quick and easy source of information, however, is what happens when the Internet goes down.
Here at The Engineer we’re lucky to have a back up. My colleague Stuart Nathan, who we affectionately refer to as ‘Stoogle’, carries around a rather burdensome amount of knowledge in his head.
When I mentioned to him that I was looking up facts about cheese for the Friday Futurescope, I could almost picture the pages of his mental index turning.
‘Are you mentioning tiromancy?’ he said.
‘What?’
I was tempted to google it, but I let Stoogle tell it to me instead.
‘It’s about reading the future through the coagulation of cheese curds.’
Is there some confusion between intelligence and knowledge? The suggestion that intelligence might decrease in the presence of increased volumes of data is ludicrous.
I would suggest that some may discover their own intelligence by exposure to material which might have been inaccesible to them before the advent of the internet.
I wonder how my own early experiments with electronics and mechanical design might have progressed if the web had been available in the 70’s.
Its to late, every thing we buy reduces our need to think . Soft ware for design increasingly incorporates invisible programs that do complicated calculations that used to require the brains of educated qualified people . China now makes everything that people need and better than any one else can . We all need to find some other way of using our brains.
Is Google making us stupid? No. It is an incredibly useful search tool but it does not remove the need for intelligent interpretation of results. Innovation is often about moving existing ideas from where they’re known to where they’re not, often in new combinations, rather than pure invention – a concept developed by Andrew Hargadon a writer and researcher on innovation (I used Google to get that attribution). If this is true then tools like Google help accelerate innovation by allowing engineers to seriously reduce the research and information gathering part of the process.
I strongly disagree with the suggestion of Search Engines such as Google reducing our intelligence.
What “some” people are forgetting is that whether the way we search for an answer to our question be in a form of book or on a computer screen; the ability to read, understand and absorb the information do not change. By using the Search Engine we are simply eliminating the time wasted and increasing our productivity.
On a similar note can one question human beings got more stupid since the invention of Dictionary?
I’d say the idea is a complete and utter nonsense. We simply look up the word we don’t understand and learn from the experience.
Now going back to the original point! We should never completely rely on technologies, but we need to understand and practice the best method to utilise the technologies to our advantage. So using Google should never be your first and last resort of acquiring information for your research, but it should be used as one of many other methods.
It is simply up to the individual.
Agreed with Peter Twissel, this is confusion of intelligence (which was the word the military used to use for knowledge, perhaps that is the excuse) and knowledge.
My reservation about all this is not the speed and efficiency of Internet referencing, but the way it is replacing paper/book libraries, and whether this is in danger of monopolising the storage and search for knowledge. Large companies now maintain their own “Intranet” with relevant references, including (for example) access to BS’s and the like. So Internet and Intranets are like any tool: useful when/where required, but don’t forget that others exist nor how to locate and use same.
And, please use “ask” if you are in the UK before Google. Monopolies are dangerous
Downloading an item of information and reproducing it somewhere else is not knowledge or intelligence.
Downloading an item of information which is understood and added to a thinker’s existing knowledge, then used to perform some useful task, needs intelligence. Intelligence cannot be downloaded.
Using Google in its current pre-chip incarnation, in common with most other (clean) uses of the internet, requires reading and writing skills. I would imagine the amount of information a person of average intelligence reads and writes every day has increased dramatically since the event of widespread use of the internet, and this can be no bad thing.
Use of “Stoogle” requires no literary interface, but by his mere presence he increases the IQ of everyone present by 10 points.