Is google making us stupid?

Had to read this for class, thought it was pretty interesting.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arch...upid/6868/

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, 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.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Click here to find out more!

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. 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.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

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.

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. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. 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.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
Nicholas Carr’s most recent book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, was published earlier this year.

Maybe -keeping- people stupid, but not -making- them stupid?

No way dude I had to read that for class too.

St Johns Universityl New York omg.

I live in socal [USC] so not same class. Was an advanced writing class that everyone needs to take to graduate.

Because copy+paste makes for such good discussion. Indeed you proved the argument in the title with your tremendously long google'd article.

Because copy+paste makes for such good discussion. Indeed you proved the argument in the title with your tremendously long google'd article.

Oh please. He read it for a class. Would you rather read the article itself or a short summary?

Personally, I think it's made people lazier, not stupider. There are plenty of people who still know tons of technical knowledge. To me, it seems like it gives people incentive to be lazy, because they have the mentality "oh I won't need to remember that, I can just google it" or something along those lines.

Some people might argue that Google makes people stupid. I prefer to think that Google is a means to prevents intelligence, via granting easy access to solutions to problems. It can also be used to gain knowledge in a snap though. (Does Bing make people even more stupid? It boasts itself to be a "decision engine" as well.)

Because copy+paste makes for such good discussion. Indeed you proved the argument in the title with your tremendously long google'd article.

... this is one of the few times I would seriously consider saying "Fail!" and mean it.

On a similar note, I love Kingdom of Loathing's Altar of Literacy test, which is required to access the IRC channel.

This is good guys keep going F5. I have an essay test on Monday and one question might be able the Google Article. No joke.

Too bad Google made me too 'stupid' to read that whole article.

Yeah, I caught the irony too.

Interestingly enough my government teacher mentioned something in passing about how it's less valuable to know facts anymore... when you can Google them up from almost anywhere.

... this is one of the few times I would seriously consider saying "Fail!" and mean it.

No honestly. Harrison has a point. Who is going to respond if I quote that long article and break it down piece by piece with counter-points? Is the article-writer going to descend on Southperry's Rubik's Cube and spend time exchanging jabs back and forth? I highly doubt that Kassoljoy will argue with a piece-to-piece breakdown on a given article as he didn't dedicate the amount of time to contribute his opinions to the piece in the first place except for the subjective impression that the piece is "interesting." Everyone else is simply skimming the basic premise of the article and not attacking any of the gaping logical holes within the piece itself which relies on anecdotal evidence, philosophy (Socrates + Nietzche), movie quips, and wikipedia-history to drive its point across. Oh wait, is there a firm singular point that drives the paper in the same vein as a hypothesis? Or is it simply a piece about a social premise? I guess "reading" is required in order to answer that question.

It is ironic that my form of "skimming" is considered by other people to be "reading," and by "ironic," I mean vastly and utterly disappointing. Harrison has shown in the past that he can be meticulous when reading a given post by subsequently breaking it down into small parts in order to offer bit-by-bit responses. Taking such time out in order to offer such in-depth responses places a major drain on time and energy, two things which are both precious to all of us. You are "reading" in the truest sense of the term, when you take the time and effort to comprehend and analyze a given piece of writing. When such considerations are given to not only understanding, but also crafting a well-written response, it is often a childish hope that someone would respond with the same mentality. If such endeavors won't receive a similar priced return, then why would one waste time to truly read and carefully respond to an article that has been copy and pasted in a matter of minutes?

The quality of an expressed opinion is representative of how well a given article has been "read." A well-thought out opinion cannot be created without the pre-requisite of having a fairly strong understanding of the article that it covers. Certain criteria can be used in order to evaluate the depth of a response such as sophistication, pertinence, and the level of detail. Determining the standards for what can be assessed as "reading" is of relevance as the article references Socrates distinguishing between the illusion of wisdom in contrast to actually possessing wisdom in its truest form. To be honest, most discussions fall short of being truly intellectual in nature, especially on the internet. Most individuals are more interested in the sense of being recognized as an intellectual, rather than receiving knowledge and intelligence. Cognition, understanding, focus, and various other factors are blanket statements to discerning a decline in intelligence. Faithful quantitative measurements for gauging innate IQ have yet to appear therefore leaving qualitative assessments to hold weight leaving the field open to sociologists to fill the gap with crap. The fears of moving towards a data-set factor of intelligence, much less AI-centered thinking is greatly unwarranted and possibly childish in how the author represents and paints the canvas with his own inner bias and misgivings. Inability to read the article in its entirety might actually be considered a progression of intelligence as time is better spent accruing objective knowledge rather than reading the subjective slant of a glorified sociologist.

Interestingly enough my government teacher mentioned something in passing about how it's less valuable to know facts anymore... when you can Google them up from almost anywhere.

After you memorize every single English word and their various definitions, you are no better than that ten dollar dictionary that you can buy at the bookstore around the corner.

Yeah, with Google, I couldn't find 30% of what I'm looking for...
Sometimes, I use Bing<3
But I use google 96% of the time, since it's logos change depending on some sort of celebration...

Intelligence is hardly composed of just the knowledge of a myriad of separate facts. Intelligence is the ability to link them together and make meaning of it. Having memorized a few dictionaries and encyclopedias does not make you smart. The easy access to information makes us lazier, not dumber.

I dont think google makes any given person smart or stupid. Some people are naturally stupid without the help of google, and some people are smart, to the extent where they can be successful regardless of the resources they are given to work with.

As some people have mentioned, google is a tool of convenience, like a calculator or a dictionary. If used correctly, it can make one more efficient, or it could tear apart the fundamentals that build towards a certain skill. For example, with long division or multiplication, while I can do it by paper, it is faster to simply punch it into the calculator and get the answer. However, if all I know is how to punch it into a calculator, then I'd be completely lost if I had to do it by hand without a calculator. Similarly, google allows us to get information quicker and easier, but we still need to process it. In the hands of the right person, they would be able to do research and write a paper in 1/5th the time. However, in a person who does not have good writing skills, all the googling in the world would not save them from mediocre information processing, poor summarizing, horrible writing, and lack of coherency in a paper.

Google isnt directlly making us stupid, but it is tearing down the fundamentals, indirectly creating more people who dont think.

No honestly. Harrison has a point. Who is going to respond if I quote that long article and break it down piece by piece with counter-points? Is the article-writer going to descend on Southperry's Rubik's Cube and spend time exchanging jabs back and forth? I highly doubt that Kassoljoy will argue with a piece-to-piece breakdown on a given article as he didn't dedicate the amount of time to contribute his opinions to the piece in the first place except for the subjective impression that the piece is "interesting." Everyone else is simply skimming the basic premise of the article and not attacking any of the gaping logical holes within the piece itself which relies on anecdotal evidence, philosophy (Socrates + Nietzche), movie quips, and wikipedia-history to drive its point across. Oh wait, is there a firm singular point that drives the paper in the same vein as a hypothesis? Or is it simply a piece about a social premise? I guess "reading" is required in order to answer that question.

It is ironic that my form of "skimming" is considered by other people to be "reading," and by "ironic," I mean vastly and utterly disappointing. Harrison has shown in the past that he can be meticulous when reading a given post by subsequently breaking it down into small parts in order to offer bit-by-bit responses. Taking such time out in order to offer such in-depth responses places a major drain on time and energy, two things which are both precious to all of us. You are "reading" in the truest sense of the term, when you take the time and effort to comprehend and analyze a given piece of writing. When such considerations are given to not only understanding, but also crafting a well-written response, it is often a childish hope that someone would respond with the same mentality. If such endeavors won't receive a similar priced return, then why would one waste time to truly read and carefully respond to an article that has been copy and pasted in a matter of minutes?

The quality of an expressed opinion is representative of how well a given article has been "read." A well-thought out opinion cannot be created without the pre-requisite of having a fairly strong understanding of the article that it covers. Certain criteria can be used in order to evaluate the depth of a response such as sophistication, pertinence, and the level of detail. Determining the standards for what can be assessed as "reading" is of relevance as the article references Socrates distinguishing between the illusion of wisdom in contrast to actually possessing wisdom in its truest form. To be honest, most discussions fall short of being truly intellectual in nature, especially on the internet. Most individuals are more interested in the sense of being recognized as an intellectual, rather than receiving knowledge and intelligence. Cognition, understanding, focus, and various other factors are blanket statements to discerning a decline in intelligence. Faithful quantitative measurements for gauging innate IQ have yet to appear therefore leaving qualitative assessments to hold weight leaving the field open to sociologists to fill the gap with crap. The fears of moving towards a data-set factor of intelligence, much less AI-centered thinking is greatly unwarranted and possibly childish in how the author represents and paints the canvas with his own inner bias and misgivings. Inability to read the article in its entirety might actually be considered a progression of intelligence as time is better spent accruing objective knowledge rather than reading the subjective slant of a glorified sociologist.

You know, half the pomegranate on this forum or more is people who just find something interesting, and share it with others. All they do is just share and nothng else.

We had to read it for class, i thought it was pretty interesting and a good read and thought some people would enjoy reading it too.

If that were the case, you clearly posted this thread in the wrong forum. If all you want to do is share, then you should have placed this in the Speakeasy, not the Rubik's Cube. The only plausible reason for you to do otherwise is that you crave attention, and since fewer people post in the Rubik's Cube than in the Speakeasy, you realized that placing this article in the Rubik's Cube would net you the most attention.

The only other explanation for posting this here is that you genuinely don't know. I find it difficult to believe that someone studying at USC, one of the best universities in the nation, can lack the ability to distinguish between two subforums whose definitions are engraved right below their names. Furthermore, it really amuses me that the article you agree with condescends on people who have an impaired ability to judge, yet you yourself are guilty of this crime.

You really didn't care what kind of attention you received, positive or negative, as long as you were showered with it. Perhaps you were under the delusion that you would seem knowledgeable when you post the words of a work that you didn't even compose. All three of your replies to this thread are irrelevant to the argument the author makes in his article, and I actually bothered to read this article twice.

I'm deeply disappointed with the hypocrisy that reeks this thread. The irony is that you prove the underlying argument of the title, and Swerve angered you by attempting to help you realize your own faults. The worst part is that you attempt to defend yourself by stating that you were merely a sheep following other people who are equally as incapable of judgment as you are. Perhaps Google is the culprit of this sheer stupidity.

You guys are total retards. I found it pretty interesting. But I didn't have the need to bash the OP and say him take your s'hit somewhere else.

That's a big set of assumptions Harrison.

Because copy+paste makes for such good discussion. Indeed you proved the argument in the title with your tremendously long google'd article.

If that were the case, you clearly posted this thread in the wrong forum. If all you want to do is share, then you should have placed this in the Speakeasy, not the Rubik's Cube. The only plausible reason for you to do otherwise is that you crave attention, and since fewer people post in the Rubik's Cube than in the Speakeasy, you realized that placing this article in the Rubik's Cube would net you the most attention.

The only other explanation for posting this here is that you genuinely don't know. I find it difficult to believe that someone studying at USC, one of the best universities in the nation, can lack the ability to distinguish between two subforums whose definitions are engraved right below their names. Furthermore, it really amuses me that the article you agree with condescends on people who have an impaired ability to judge, yet you yourself are guilty of this crime.

You really didn't care what kind of attention you received, positive or negative, as long as you were showered with it. Perhaps you were under the delusion that you would seem knowledgeable when you post the words of a work that you didn't even compose. All three of your replies to this thread are irrelevant to the argument the author makes in his article, and I actually bothered to read this article twice.

I'm deeply disappointed with the hypocrisy that reeks this thread. The irony is that you prove the underlying argument of the title, and Swerve angered you by attempting to help you realize your own faults. The worst part is that you attempt to defend yourself by stating that you were merely a sheep following other people who are equally as incapable of judgment as you are. Perhaps Google is the culprit of this sheer stupidity.

Typical Harrison posts.

Interesting read.