Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Abstract

nicholas carr"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, forlornly. "I can feel it. I can feel it."I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going-so far as I can tell-but it's changing. 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 think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Nicholas Carr, former executive editor for the Harvard Business Review, is the author of several widely-acclaimed books on technology and the economy. Mr. Carr's writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Financial Times, The New York Times, Strategy and Business, and The Guardian.

An investigation of teachers' perceptions of using ChatGPT as a supporting tool for teaching and learning in the digital era

“…With that being said, for students who were not receiving proper guidance on using ChatGPT, cases of cheating and misconduct have arisen recently after launching ChatGPT (Muskat, 2023; Peritz, 2022). In examining the history of technology, there were also fears and concerns from educators about overusing Google search engines and how it can slow down cognitive processes (Carr, 2008) or students' reliance on untrusted sources of Wikipedia (Meishar‐Tal, 2015) or how the use of smartphones crippled students' inability to write complete sentences (Strain‐Moritz, 2016).…”

“…As we examine the history of technology, there were fears and concerns from educators about overusing Google search engines and how it can slow down cognitive processes (Carr, 2008), worries about students' reliance on the untrusted sources of Wikipedia (Meishar‐Tal, 2015), or how the use of smartphones crippled students' inability to write complete sentences (Strain‐Moritz, 2016). On the contrary, those technologies benefited students and educators as well as used as personalized learning for students with disability or learning difficulties.…”

Mediation of transactive memory capability in relationship of social media usage and job performance

“…Social media has a significant role in information acquisition due to its accessibility, diversity, and real-time nature because social media platforms provide updates of various topics, from news and current events to industry trends and personal interests but it is affecting memory of people ( 1 ). Sparrow et al.…”

Improving Job Performance Through Social Media: The Mediating Role of Transactive Memory Capability

“…People are now reliant on online sources rather than making an effort to remember the knowledge. Some claim that this phenomena led to a decline in people's capacity for memory [1]. However, Sparrow et al [2] provided a fresh viewpoint with their investigation into how Google searches affect the human memory system.…”