Is Google Making Students Stupid?

Students have always been stupid. The only thing that changes is the reason. It used to be newspapers. Then comic books. Now Google.

The hand-wringing and moral panic are always talked up by innumerates who have neither measured the purported decline in student capabilities nor adduced any reason as to why the technology in question creates the purported affect--at least, they never give any reasons that go beyond pandering to the prejudices of their own generation.

Generally, technology improves intellectual capabilities. Newspapers informed. Comic books introduce young people to stories they might not have encountered otherwise. Texting improves literacy (what else would you expect from a technology that allows young people to carry on complex social lives entirely via the written word?) and the kind of transparent access to a diversity of information sources that Google provides increases a wide range of intellectual capabilities by giving students access to actual facts to think about, rather than the completely useless contents of their imagination.

It is true, as the article says, that certain formerly-important skills will be lost, and the type of mistake we used to make will be replaced by a new type of mistake. But are the new types of mistake more frequent (unlikely, and not mentioned) or more severe (also unlikely, also not mentioned) than the old types of mistake? Strangely, anti-Bayesian articles like this one never even try to do a proper accounting of the number of old-type mistakes avoided by the technology, focusing entirely--and misleadingly--on the types of mistake enabled by the new technology. This is lazy, dishonest and misleading.

To put it another way, work-processing has had a terrible effect on typing accuracy, but who cares?

The author is well aware of the tradition of hand-wringing he is joining; He makes reference to Plato’s Phaedrus! But he doesn't actually make an argument for why it actually matters that students don't learn to spell English's arbitrary orthography. His introductory example of GPS and wilderness survival is the only compelling case.

Searching for information online isn't making anyone stupid, because people do in fact retain what they discover. Because it is so accessible, some people do it all the time. By contrast, in the past, people didn't have time to go a library frequently. The world wide web is making people better informed, including people from walks of life that are not traditionally associated with being informed. At least broadly if not deeply, but perhaps deeply, too, in areas that catch their interest.

Today you're stupid if you don't make effective use of all this. We cringe when someone asks a question online that could have been googled in three seconds.

Everybody is unique and they are capable of understanding the environment around us in a better way. Having "faster" access to knowledge via Libraries in the past, Internet these days is really amazing -- when individual tries to understand things and improvise on it.

Rather, one behavioural change that occurs is "why remember, when i have can select from the list of other answers" -- is what is going to degrade (shortcircuit) the thinking process and is not going to contribute back in any different way. Being student is the phase where there is lot of reasoning, getting answers, improvising on existing like qualities needs to be developed. In such a phase, getting into "why remember" might not be good for an individual growth. There is no surprise that in future when the intellect of an individual becomes that of "few intelligent folks who are on internet." -- this is going to be really bad. (Remember wall-e movie ?) Technology is just one part of life, there are so many things that our senses are capable of processing, understanding, experiencing. All that happens when we put the correct "student" hat.

Nobody is "stupid". If you don't go in the right path, even after so many clues you will remain stupid.

People who are "smart" should guide these so called "stupid" people. Why are we here for else ? Lets encourage students to rely more on their acquired intellect and build upon it. Its really good for the socieity as the newer generations can look at things in a rapidly different way.

I'm going to throw out a different idea. Google (and WP) is a cognitive aid to humans. Instead of trying to jam all this information into a couple/three pounds of neurons bouncing around in our head. Why not just store the mnemonics/semantic pointers for accessing that information wherever it might be. In our brain pans, out on the web, in a book, wherever.

Human civilization underwent a radical transformation because we learned how to put what's in our heads into long-term storage (writing), why isn't a massive, immediately accessible global knowledge base of all knowledge just the next step in this?

Perhaps it's stupid to try to cram an encyclopedia+ into the volume of our skulls, and maybe it's smarter to try to cram it all into a globally accessible information store instead?

full disclosure, I looked up the average weight of a human brain and synonyms for skull on Google while writing this