Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Description

A well written article on how internet has changed the way we read and think.  Few years back, i can easily read articles of this length. But nowadays (as stated in the article) i get easily distracted. I guess i am  reprogrammed !!!. Few good snippets from the article:

=> "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

=> “We are not only what we read, We are how we read.”

=> When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

=> When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

=> In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

=> The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

=> as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence

Original URL

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google