Is Google Making Us Dumber?

Google is by far the most widely used search engine available today on the Web. The site receives several hundred million queries each day, and is worth approximately US$23 billion. Not bad for a couple of Stanford University students.

However, the ubiquitous use and availability of Google has raised questions among some academics that Google makes finding information so easy that the traditional methods of research and studying are becoming obsolete.

Students, teachers, and the general public use Google everyday to retrieve information. However, information on the Web can often be fragmented and incomplete. More traditional print such as books, journals and magazines usually have much more detailed information. This can lead to the educational argument that perhaps the Web as a whole is not a great learning resource and should only be used to access information. More traditional forms such as written media or lecture might be better sources for learning.

Of course the original purpose of Google was not as a teaching tool. Google creators Sergey Brin and Larry Page wanted to build a system that could efficiently organize information, not increase intelligence. However, the fact is that Google is now being used in the classrooms as more than just a research tool. It is used to present information as fact. Marshall McLuhan noted the influence of media in the 1960's long before Google or the Internet existed. He stated that "media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought."

We now live in a world of instant gratification. Why spend an hour researching through journals, articles, and books when an Internet search can provide the same information in a matter of seconds. Can't remember your mom's meatloaf recipe? Google it! Can't remember the capital of Norway? Google it! It would seem that we don't really need to remember anything anymore. Some teachers would scream at the idea and proclaim that our students are becoming dumber because they don't have to memorize anything like we did growing up. But is intelligence knowing information or knowing how to retrieve information?

Could an argument be made that all vast repositories of information decrease intelligence? Do encyclopedias make us dumber? Of course not. But an encyclopedia contains facts that have been checked and verified by experts. Information gathered from Encyclopedia Britannica would be much more reliable than information gathered from The National Enquirer. Google doesn't make this distinction. It simply presents search results. It is up to the user to determine the validity and reliability of the information contained within these results.

Socrates argued that the development of writing and a reliance on the written word would cause people to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction”. These people would “cease to exercise their memory, become forgetful and be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” The invention of the Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, again led philosophers and academics to proclaim that people would become less studious, lazy, and that the mass production of books would demean the work of scholars and scribes. Whether these opinions have been proven true is debatable. However, few can debate how these advances in technology have helped spread information, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom). I believe that the Internet and Google do the same. What do you think?

Questions to Ponder:

1. How many times do you or your students use Google to find information for a project, assignment or homework? Is the information subjected to a reliability / validity test?

2. How many times were you offline and annoyed because you couldn't just look some info up on Google?

3. 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 high school (like unit conversion, simple math, calculating time-zone differences)?

Referenced Articles for Further Review:

Why Google is Making Us Dumber: a good blog with many for-and-against comments.

Is Google Making Us Stupid: an article in the Atlantic that proposes that the Net seems to be reducing our capacity for concentration and contemplation.

Google Is Making You Dumber: a debate from Business Week containing a nice Pro and Con comparison for this argument.