Google STILL isn’t making us Stoopid

For all of you nostalgic readers out there, think back, think wayyyy back to July 2008. NASA announces the discovery of water in the atmosphere of Mercury and water on Mars.  The search continues for water in West Texas.  Rafael Nadal of Spain beats Roger Federer of Switzerland in the Wimbledon finals. Chinese restaurants in Beijing are told not to serve dog meat during the 2008 Summer Olympics—but donkey meat is OK. Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke assures us that mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in no danger of failing.  An internal U.S. Department of Justice report found senior aide to former U.S. Attorney General Albert Gonzales illegally based hiring decisions on political affiliation. and U.S. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska is indicted on seven counts related to his conduct as senator.

July/August 2008 was also the time that Atlantic Monthly ran a six-page cover article by Nicholas Carr entitled “Is Google Making us Stupid? .  That article spawned a website Is Google Making us Dumber? that includes actual Google searches such as:

Why do our belly buttons smell?

When will I die?

Is it illegal to eat an orange in a bathtub In California?

And Is Afghanistan in Iraq?

(answers at the end)

As I noted in an earlier blog entry, Carr argued that the Internet is reducing our capacity to concentrate and contemplate. He notes a five-year study that showed that most online readers are grazers who only skim the surface of articles before flitting off to another article. Carr also argues that our capacity to contemplate may be diminishing as we rely on the Internet to do our intellectual heavy lifting rather than use our minds to find solutions to problems.  Carr’s arguments caused a firestorm of debate on the blogosphere and even among neurological experts.

Pew Research recently put the question of “Does Google Make us Stupid?”  to 371 long-time Internet experts talking about the future of the Internet.  In a related question they were asked to “share your view of the Internet’s influence on the future of human intelligence in 2020 — what is likely to stay the same and what will be different in the way human intellect evolves?” These experts overwhelmingly (81%) thought Carr was wrong.  One of the main arguments advanced by experts is that the Internet and search engines will shift cognitive capacities away from memorization. Indeed, Google and other search engines will require people to think harder and have better critical thinking and analytical skills. The time we don’t have to spend memorizing can be used to master those new critical and analytical skills.  For instance, Stephen Downes, of the Canadian National Research Council said: “It’s a mistake to treat intelligence as an undifferentiated whole. No doubt we will become worse at doing some things (‘more stupid’) requiring rote memory of information that is now available though Google. But with this capacity freed, we may (and probably will) be capable of more advanced integration and evaluation of information (‘more intelligent’).”   Others noted that Google is taking the fall for people’s personalities: “Technology isn’t the problem here. It is people’s inherent character traits. The Internet and search engines just enable people to be more of what they already are. If they are motivated to learn and  are shrewd, they will use new tools to explore in exciting new ways. If they are lazy or incapable of concentrating, they will find new ways to be distracted and goof off.”  For instance communication studies professor David Ellis argued: “Google isn’t making us stupid — but it is making many of us intellectually lazy. This has already become a big problem in university classrooms. For my undergrad majors in Communication Studies, Google may take over the hard work involved in finding good source material for written assignments. Unless pushed in the right direction, students will opt for the top 10 or 15 hits as their research strategy. And it’s the students most in need of research training who are the least likely to avail themselves of more sophisticated tools like Google Scholar.” Or as Sandra Kelly, market researcher for 3M Corporation put it:  “I would guess that smart people will use the Internet for smart things and stupid people will use it for stupid things in the same way that smart people read literature and stupid people read crap fiction.”

What do you think? Is Carr right that Google is making us a nation of skimmers or is it aiding human intelligence by moving us away from mere memorization to new critical and analytical skills?  For you professors out there, is Google helping students think more or it is just encouraging laziness?

Answers to questions:

1. Bellybuttons CAN smell bad, particularly if you never bother to wash them.  Two words: Try soap!
2. I just searched it on Google, and you WILL die in a horribly wheat threshing accident tomorrow.
3. I didn’t think ANYTHING was illegal in California. But I was wrong.  California bans people from owning ferrets.  If you feel as strong as I do that Californians are being denied one of their basic human rights, visit to sign a petition to legalize those furry creatures. http://www.petitiononline.com/CAferret/petition.html
4. They are two separate countries, but it would be easy to get them confused.  IRAQ was the war that we entered without any strong strategic plan and with little hope of emerging with anything resembling victory.  Or is that Afghanistan?