Is Google Making Us Stupid?

[Scott]

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’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Link

People are just getting lazy, not necessarily stupid

[LiNuX]

google turned 10 years old this month having over a trillion pages in their search engine, about 250k from Gamers Forum lol

i haven't gotten stupid from using google, I've actually gotten smarter being able to search for things I want and get the results easily

and also unlike the guy that stopped reading books cuz of the internet...i stopped reading books before i started using the internet lol...i was super lazy back then and kind of the same right now when it comes to reading books

[Metallica1983]

google turned 10 years old this month having over a trillion pages in their search engine, about 250k from Gamers Forum lol

i haven't gotten stupid from using google, I've actually gotten smarter being able to search for things I want and get the results easily

and also unlike the guy that stopped reading books cuz of the internet...i stopped reading books before i started using the internet lol...i was super lazy back then and kind of the same right now when it comes to reading books

I'm with LiNuX the web hasn't messed with my ability to read I read your whole post and I can still read a full manga in a day so its probably all in your head

[LemonRising]

I never stopped reading books because of the internet, wtf.
I mean, I go through periods where I don't write, don't read, and don't WANT to do either, but that's got nothing to do with the internet. I always hop back on my literature horse and plow through books.
Blaming the internet is stupid.
In fact, I found the internet makes it EASIER to read (torrentplz harharhar).

I call BOOLSHOT
"Ohhh blah blah, I was a professor then I got old and now my brainz dont werk gud, so I blames internetzlolexcuses"

[conman1000]

Stop reading books because of the internet, how many people actually have?