Is Google Making Us Stupid?What the Internet is doing to our

brains.Nicholas Carr

The Net as Universal Medium

• It supplies the stuff of thought and shapes the process of thought.

• It’s becoming our map and clock, printing press and typewriter, calculator, telephone, radio and TV

• Traditional media have to adapt to audience new expectations - REMEDIATION

How The Brain Works

“The Brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.” It is adaptable.– Writing equipment takes

part in the forming of our thoughts

– Brains: clockwork-like, computer-like

Things to Contemplate• How many times did you use Google to find an article within a

specific website instead of using a website’s search?• How many times were you offline and annoyed because you

couldn’t just look some info up on Google • How often do you use Google to do really simple tasks, the type of

tasks you used to easily do with pen and paper in highschool (like unit conversion, simple math, calculating time-zone differences)?

• How many times did you catch yourself typing some keywords into Google to get to a specific website?

• Do you realize that by doing this, you’ve subconsciously chosen to remember what keywords you need to type into Google instead of remembering the actual address of the web site in question?

Google

Google definition using the collaboration features of Google Docs.

• Google was a search engine. Google is more than the sum of its usable parts. It is an entity that many use to access personalized information and find both new and old ideas alike. It is now an essential part of the Internet.

• Google is the other half of my brain.• Google is a gateway to millions of ideas.• Google is the crossroad where life is

transfered from desktops to the Internet.

Google’s mission

• Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

• Develop “the perfect search engine”▼

as smart as people or smarter▼

The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive

Google and Net Business Model

The idea that human brain = high speed data processing network’s business model

Google’s business model

The faster we surf across the web more links we click and pages we view Google gathers more information about us more ads to feed to us.

Goal: Drive us to distraction.

Using Internet = Using Google

What The Net (Google) Does to Our Brains?

Carr’s point of view• It weakens our brain capacity

for deep reading“efficiancy & mediacy” vs

traditional reading

• We are turning into “pancake people”

• Our own intelligence flattens into artificial intelligence

“And soon pretty well everybody, from schoolchildren to drinkers in pubs, will be online pretty well all of the time. In that context, perhaps there is no longer any point in keeping facts in our heads. If you want to know who wrote “Skellig”, or whether Norway is a member of the European Union, or what Cary Grant’s real name was, you ask your laptop or your phone” –Brian Catchart, Is Google Killing General Knowledge?

“So what if the kids aren’t reading properly…or learning the more difficult skills of logic and analysis that come from that kind of reading? The answer is to downgrade verbal and numerical abilities to “lower-order skills” in comparison with the spatial, information-gathering, and pattern-recognition skills fostered by hours at the computer screen…in the future, everybody will come out at the end of the educational process with a Ph.D. in googling. Why should we necessarily suppose that they need anything more?” –James Bowman, Is Stupid Making Us Google?

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TW9HGuWMJo&feature=related

Video

Conclusion

We live in a fast paced world and need fast paced results using Google

References

• 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google www.55fun.com/book.pdf

• Is Stupid Making Us Google? http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/is-stupid-making-us-google

• http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~tk883/literature/free.pdf• http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=6TW9HGuWMJo&feature=related• Is Google Killing General Knowledge by Brian Catchart

http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/brian-cathcart/no-passes

• http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-books/google-makes-us-stupid/221