How does the Internet affect our thinking?

          Is the popular search engine Google making us stupid? Nicholas Carr wrote an article in 2008 asking what the Internet is doing to our brains and how it is affecting us. In the article he writes, “over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain.”  Is the Internet to blame?

When I first read this line in his article I was immediately alarmed at the thought that technology could have such a huge impact on our learning and the way we think. When Nicholas Carr begins describing his reactions to reading longer texts, I realized that I possessed similar reactions. For instance, when I read books or articles that have extensive text, I get fidgety, I dread the amount of time its going to take me to finish, and I begin looking for something else to do. Growing up with texting, social media, and instant access to everything, shorter and faster is always better.

This article describes how the Internet and the new media are making information more accessible and easier to read. The Internet allows us to locate information more quickly and answer questions about topics faster. But are we really learning and retaining the information we are seeing? These days, people (including me) are really just skimming articles and assignments instead of reading the full text. The shorter attention span we have developed in this age of technology has resulted in spending less time on research and missing important information.  The bottom line is that we may not be learning the information as fully even though access to more information.

Prior to the Internet, it was a much more extensive process writing a research paper.  First, you had to go to the library and check out a book on your topic, read it, take notes, and then write the actual paper. It was a much longer process but by spending that much time a student probably learned the information a lot better.  Today when writing a research paper, all you have to do is Google the topic, find a web site, read and write about it. This process is much faster and easier, yes, but are we really learning as much as we should?

So the question remains is Google making us stupid? I don’t think that it is making us stupid, I think that the way information is so easily accessible it provides us with more knowledge. However I also think that Google is making researching subjects more efficient but making our full understanding less proficient. We now have less academic discipline then before Internet but we now have easier access to information. So, no I don’t think Google is making us stupid.