What will be the next Google be...?

Some people think the internet is making us stoopid. I disagree.

Google is blamed as a leading cause of our lack of intelligence; at least that is the perception we get from a recent article. I don’t feel that this article really tells the whole truth though. There is much that we forget, and it is easy to get caught up while reading the article. There are good points that are made; it does seem that we rely on Google for everything, blindly trusting everything that their algorithms spit out for us—just like we do not always check our facts from Wikipedia (despite what we may say). We have become sheep who blindly follow whatever is front of us for the time being. Or am I the only one who felt those things while reading the article? I get the feeling that other people felt this way too, it’s hard not to. As I have already stated these are some seemingly good points that are made.

But is this really everything there is to say on this subject? There are two sides to every truth, and we are taught to take everything with a grain of salt—and in some cases a spoonful (again, maybe that was just me).

I do not believe that this is all we can say about Google in our current era though. There will always be dissent, and I welcome that with open arms because it indicates that there are still individuals out there with free thoughts who are willing to challenge authority and think for themselves. This does not inherently make the dissent accurate and true though. I believe it is, in fact, false. From the time that the printing press was invented, and even writing on scrolls, there have been people who felt that a written history would make us stupid because we would no longer retain the same amount of information. We would become lazy and rely on the printed and written history instead of retaining it within ourselves to be passed down to the younger generation. From the time that writing was invented, to the printing press, to the eraser, to television, to the internet, to Wikipedia, to Google. The history of dissent has long been proven to be an inaccurate fear in these cases because they have not made us less intelligent at all. Should Shakespeare be regarded as stupid because all of his plays were written down? Was Gutenberg stupid because he invented the printing press? Are you stupid because in third grade you messed up on a spelling test, erased what you had written, and then corrected yourself—meaning you were not using your brain enough to not write the correct spelling the first time?

NO.

We should not let ourselves be tricked by the dissenting opinion in this case. What we have been able to observe from all of the past examples that I have mentioned is that we do not become more stupid, rather we adapt our intelligence. We learn differently, and more importantly we learn what information we have to keep stored in our brains and what information we can easily access from another location (one which can conceivably hold an infinite amount of knowledge, I might add). It is not Google that is making us stupid, but failing to learn how to discern good information from bad information.

Source:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/