Is Google Making Us Stupid?

08/20/2008

Men's natures are alike, it is their habits that carry them far apart.
Confucius

These were the provocative words on the cover of Atlantic Monthly (July 2008). The article's author, Nicholas Carr explains:

"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."

But, he writes, "That boon comes at a price.... 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." He says he's not alone. His friends agree that the more they use the Internet, the harder it is to concentrate on long passages of writing.

Carr also cites a recently published study of online research habits from the University College London that examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. The researchers found that people using the sites exhibited what they called "'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."

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