Is Google Making Us Stupid?

    In an article by Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Carr discusses the downside of using Web 2.0 as a medium to access mass information. He argues that using search engines such as Google, distract the viewer from the content of the information that he or she is viewing. Carr also suggests that the amount of information that people are absorbing is slowly decreasing the attention span of Web 2.0 users. In a quote by Carr from his article, he admits to the fact that he, himself, has noticed a significant change in the way he thinks and analyzes information he sees on the web.

"...Media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." (Carr, 2008)

From Carr's perception, users of Web 2.0 are unknowingly having the carpet pulled out from under them. He urges caution and concern for heavy internet users who continually absorb and contribute to the database of the web. Yet, Carr proves this to be a difficult feat to the extent that internet users are addicted to the convenience of the internet's mass information accessibility. Google is robbing people of their very own attention spans. People may or may not believe this to be true but it's possible that Google, as a universal medium of acquiring an infinite amount of information, is depriving people of keeping their attention on specific topics and information; not in the real world but in the digital one.

Although this concern for people's mental abilities to keep in check may be in for some change, it is not necessarily a bad thing that this new medium of Web 2.0 has so much to offer. Looking at it from the perspective of cause and affect, we may agree that the web has a lot to offer society in terms of information and accessibility. However, as a result, the only trade-off people may have to come to terms with is their ability to keep interested in the infinite amount of information they have access to at their finger tips. Perhaps this effect of attention loss may not be the most unsettling but really, it could be merely a trade off for acquiring more information. Although some people might find themselves spending less time on one page than another, the amount of information they may find themselves skimming through may hold something more to offer than the last. In short, I believe that people may find Web 2.0 to help them acquire more information than less even if it means that information isn't as specific or in depth as people may find it from reading a book or article.

Carr suggests that the new forms of today's media are re-shaping and reprogramming the way people learn, function, and think. He argues that the old forms of media will have to adapt to keep up with the new forms or become irrelevant and forgotten. It is the main reason people are finding a lack of interest in much of the media they consume today. "The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets." (Carr, 2008)