Monday, October 26, 2009

r u Google dumb?

Is Google Making Us Stupid? As anyone can see that the pursuit of truth is no longer the most desired outcome perpetrated by the acquisition of knowledge. If the pursuit of knowledge is to perpetuate the illusion of truth intelligence than that would be the best definition of what Google is does. It is because of Google’s ease of use that allows its user to be the facilitator of knowledge rather than then the creator and occupier of that knowledge. It is via the use of the tool that it shapes its user rather than the other way around. People have gone from knowing information to a place of accessing that information.
The common person that uses the internet daily becomes victim to that ease of use. When someone utilizes the internet to fill in the blanks that their brain has begun to omit, than they are in fact allowing Google to change the way they think and interact with that knowledge. The need to store knowledge in our own heads has become an obsolete notion, especially when by the pushing of certain buttons can recall that information easier, and most likely more accurately.
This sounds like this recalling, via the computer, is an evolution of the thought process when it is in fact the decline of memory and applicable knowledge. Plato found that the creation and utilization of writing began to affect the thinking process. He believed that more and more people were going to use writing as a place to store their ideas and less effort on holding on to them in their own minds for ease of access. Plato believed that writing could also spin out of control with its misuse and grant power to many people who did not deserve: welcome sophists and rhetoricians.
Google has effectively become the super computer HAL, which Guy Billout, the author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” recurrently writes about as a comparison. Our society constantly relies on the search power of Google and it is affecting our ability to search and create answers of our own. “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”

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