Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Found this interesting article today..

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

This passage really struck home for me..

“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 haven’t been able to sit down and a read a book for years now.  Like the author of that article said, I lose my focus after a few pages. 

I was thinking about kids these days and how when my nephew ends up in college in 4 years how drastically different of an informational landscape it’ll be.  The internet was still in its widespread infancy back in ‘94 when I started college.  I remember being a Prodigy user back in the day.  I had an email address through an honors english class I was in.  I could get on the web in the computer science lab.  But the majority of any research I had to do was done by trudging to the library, searching titles for something that might be somewhat relevant to my topic, trudging *editor’s note* did alot of trudging in college, must’ve been all the books I had to carry through the bookshelves, craning my neck to read the spines of the books to find the one I needed, taking the book back to a nook and skimming through it, trying to decide if it was relevant enough to my topic or not, putting it back, wash, rinse, repeat…

Now in the age of google and wikipedia and mobile devices with internet access, information is so readily available for us at our fingertips.  But is that a good thing?  I think it was a good character-building experience to have to go through the actual research process.  It was kind of like a right of passage to get through higher education and achieve a degree.  You want a degree?  Prove it.  Do the literal legwork necessary to complete the task put before you.