A Pew Survey Asks Will Google Make Us More Stupid or More Intelligent?
"Among the issues addressed in the survey was the provocative question raised by eminent tech scholar Nicholas Carr in a cover story for the Atlantic Monthly magazine in the summer of 2009: 'Is Google Making us Stupid?' Carr argued that the ease of online searching and distractions of browsing through the web were possibly limiting his capacity to concentrate. 'I'm not thinking the way I used to,' he wrote, in part because he is becoming a skimming, browsing reader, rather than a deep and engaged reader. 'The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas .... If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content,' we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.'
Respondents were also asked to "share your view of the internet's influence on the future of human intelligence in 2020 — what is likely to stay the same and what will be different in the way human intellect evolves?" What follows is a selection of the hundreds of written elaborations and some of the recurring themes in those answers:
Nicholas Carr and Google staffers have their say:
• "I feel compelled to agree with myself. But I would add that the Net's effect on our intellectual lives will not be measured simply by average IQ scores. What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information
• "My conclusion is that when the only information on a topic is a handful of essays or books, the best strategy is to read these works with total concentration. But when you have access to thousands of articles, blogs, videos, and people with expertise on the topic, a good strategy is to skim first to get an overview. Skimming and concentrating can and should coexist. I would also like to say that Carr has it mostly backwards when he says that Google is built on the principles of Taylorism [the institution of time-management and worker-activity standards in industrial settings]. Taylorism shifts responsibility from worker to management, institutes a standard method for each job, and selects workers with skills unique for a specific job. Google does the opposite, shifting responsibility from management to the worker, encouraging creativity in each job, and encouraging workers to shift among many different roles in their career .... Carr is of course right that Google thrives on understanding data. But making sense of data (both for Google internally and for its users) is not like building the same artifact over and over on an assembly line; rather it requires creativity, a mix of broad and deep knowledge, and a host of connections to other people. That is what Google is trying to facilitate." — Peter Norvig, Google Research Director
• "Google will make us more informed. The smartest person in the world could well be behind a plow in China or India. Providing universal access to information will allow such people to realize their full potential, providing benefits to the entire world." — Hal Varian, Google, chief economist
The resources of the internet and search engines will shift cognitive capacities. We won't have to remember as much, but we'll have to think harder and have better critical thinking and analytical skills. Less time devoted to memorization gives people more time to master those new skills.
• "Google allows us to be more creative in approaching problems and more integrative in our thinking. We spend less time trying to recall and more time generating solutions." — Paul Jones, ibiblio, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
• "Google will make us stupid and intelligent at the same time. In the future, we will live in a transparent 3D mobile media cloud that surrounds us everywhere. In this cloud, we will use intelligent machines, to whom we delegate both simple and complex tasks. Therefore, we will lose the skills we needed in the old days (e.g., reading paper maps while driving a car). But we will gain the skill to make better choices (e.g., knowing to choose the mortgage that is best for you instead of best for the bank). All in all, I think the gains outweigh the losses." — Marcel Bullinga, Dutch Futurist at futurecheck.com
• "I think that certain tasks will be 'offloaded' to Google or other Internet services rather than performed in the mind, especially remembering minor details. But really, that is a role that paper has taken over many centuries: did Gutenberg make us stupid? On the other hand, the Internet is likely to be front-and-centre in any developments related to improvements in neuroscience and human cognition research." — Dean Bubley, wireless industry consultant
• "What the internet (here subsumed tongue-in-cheek under "Google") does is to support SOME parts of human intelligence, such as analysis, by REPLACING other parts such as memory. Thus, people will be more intelligent about, say, the logistics of moving around a geography because "Google" will remember the facts and relationships of various locations on their behalf. People will be better able to compare the revolutions of 1848 and 1789 because "Google" will remind them of all the details as needed. This is the continuation ad infinitum of the process launched by abacuses and calculators: we have become more "stupid" by losing our arithmetic skills but more intelligent at evaluating numbers." — Andreas Kluth, writer, Economist magazine
Read the entire study at the Pew American Life and Internet Project site.