Is Google Making Me Stupid?

To this question I have to answer both yes and no. It might seem a cop-out, but in actuality I believe it hurts just as much as it helps. Google is both extremely convenient and efficient, making research that once took days only last a few minutes. Google puts an amazing amount of resources at everyone's hands, you no longer need to waste time or money on finding valuable information. Google's chief executive states, in Carr's article, that Google is "a company that's founded around the science of measurement, and is striving to systematize everything." This is where the "hurt" aspect of my argument comes in. Google not only has successfully systematized the media, it's successfully systematized the way we think and process information. On Google's intentions, Carr says, "the more pieces of information we can 'access' and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers." But do we really? Our method of simply "googling" information and skimming the links to find what we're looking for can really be classified as deep thinking and productivity. It's more of a shallow extraction of information; we're just looking for what we immediately need to know and nothing more. We're not becoming any smarter through this new search process. This skimming has also decreased our abilities to concentrate on something for a period of time, and to be honest, I didn't realize that it had in fact happened to me until I read this article. I'm no longer able to concentrate on anything more than a few lines at a given time, when at a younger age I was able to read for hours on end. Google is a contradiction in itself; it takes away and it gives back.

Mally Espaillat