Has Google helped/hurt society?
This article caught my eye a few weeks ago. I am sure it has been talked out already, but I I wanted to make sure it was included here.
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 thought the irony in the article showed when he talked about how reading anything more than 3 or 4 paragraphs was extremely difficult for him, yet he wrote a rather long article about it. And honestly, I didn’t even get to the end of it. I might later on, I have it in my bookmarks for later.
As a teacher, I don’t ask myself why kids don’t read the whole document anymore. I know why. It is longer than 2 paragraphs and they don’t care if they haven’t found the info. by then.
