Is+Google+Making+us+Stupid?

Is Making us An Opinion In reading the articles //Get Smarter// and //Is Google making us Stupid?// I find myself agreeing more and more with James Cascio who wrote //Get Smarter.// “Someone or something has been tinkering with my brain.” This statement, presented by Nicholas Carr in the opening paragraphs of his article //Is Google Making Us Stupid?//, brings to mind the image of a clock smith sitting over a clock (or brain) moving gears and springs. I think that this statement is misleading. It makes the reader think that the information presented to us is changing the way we think. I believe that in actuality the situation is more like it was presented by Jamais Cascio is //Get Smarter.// We are changing the way that we think to adapt to the way that information is now being presented to us. Google is not making us stupid, Google is making us more accurate. Before the days of internet and Google if we were not sure about something we would guess or have to look it up, but most likely guess because looking something up takes time and you can’t exactly stop in the middle of a lesson to fact check. Now if I’m teaching and a student asks a question and I’m not exactly sure of the answer, I look it up and can give them an exact answer immediately. This is makes us smarter, not stupid. Outside of the education field, the instant information is also very important. I was talking recently to a nurse. She was complaining that a coworker believed that using technology and search engines makes you a bad nurse because you don’t know the information off the top of your head. The argument to this line of thinking was that there are so many changes to the medical field from medications and treatments that there is no way that one person can know it all. By using search engines and other technologies a nurse can keep up with all the latest information in the field.



So, maybe technology is making us read in a different way, think in a different way, and even research in a different way, but change can be good. This kind of change is making us think in ways and about things that we never would have thought possible. It is making everything that we perceive to be science fiction and letting us make it reality. I was reading an article recently about scientists creating a small scale invisibility cloak. A technology straight out of Star Trek! And how did they first come up with the prototype? Computer simulations of course! They used the intelligence of a computer to augment their own and create a working invisibility cloak. This is the way that we can expect the future to go now. Concepts will come to life on the computer before they are ever tested in real life. Years ago psychiatrist Carl Jung developed his idea of the Collective Unconscious; a collection of knowledge that we all have access to in our subconsciously and in our dreams. This knowledge comes from our ancestors’ experiences. It was Jung’s belief that we could interpret out dreams and learn more about this collective unconscious. Now, as indicated by Jamais Cascio in his article, the collective unconscious is no longer unconscious but fully conscious and out there for everyone to access at will. With the click of a few buttons and a few swipes of the mouse you and access any and all information you want. Just as the printing press revolutionized the way that information was spread by making it more accessible to everyone, the internet and other immerging technologies are making even more information accessible to even more people. media type="file" key="google quote.wma" width="353" height="36"