When I find myself being stupid online, I blame Google. (When I find myself being stupid offline, I blame my parents.)

Ever consider that there are adults today that have lived their entire lives in the digital age?

The following essay is as excellent today as it was in 2008. It serves as a touchstone for me:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

Snippet:

“Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

“Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.”


The antidote:

Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/08/reading-in-the-age-of-constant-distraction/

Snippet:

“Early in The Gutenberg Elegies, [Sven] Birkerts summarizes historian Rolf Engelsing’s definition of reading “intensively” as the common practice of most readers before the nineteenth century, when books, which were scarce and expensive, were often read aloud and many times over. As reading materials—not just books, but newspapers, magazines, and ephemera—proliferated, more recent centuries saw the rise of reading “extensively”: we read these materials once, often quickly, and move on. Birkerts coins his own terms: the deep, devotional practice of “vertical” reading has been supplanted by “horizontal” reading, skimming along the surface. This shift has only accelerated dizzyingly in the time since Engelsing wrote in 1974, since Birkerts wrote in 1994, and since I wrote, yesterday, the paragraph above.”

Human, going vertical after too much horizontal

"I just skimmed it...  But it seems to make some sense. Do you have a YouTube link?"

--Average Joe

Having worked in the news business for a few decades you are seeing the continuing legacy of USA Today online.

When the paper first came out it was easy to read and digest the stories. That was because they were edited and condensed heavily to be short and "sweet". No full stories with in depth investigation and reporting. A newspaper designed for the TV Generations whose attention span was challenged with anything longer than the time between two TV commercials.

During this time papers also stopped headlines on the front pages as "Dodgers Win, details inside" - just as TV news stopped the same thing when teasing TV news. You no longer got "Lakers Win, news at 10" and instead got nothing on results. Just teasers.

A few generations now weaned on Television with attenuated attention spans. Less emphasis on analysis and in depth stories. More attention to "instant experts" over those with long experience and a real shaming of so many with PhD's and such who are the real experts in specialized areas. A Sound Bite with nothing past a teaser is what is seen and heard.

The dumbing down is here in full force.

News programs on networks and local stations are abominations.

The manipulation is right up there with what mormonism dishes out!

Please know that Google cannot, I repeat, CANNOT! teach you to count cards so that you can clean up at the Blackjack tables in Las Vegas!

Google has increased my knowledge a great deal.

Current film directing and editing also reduces the need for serious acting: much less time to assess face, blocking, voice intonation, etc.

No one goes to an Avengers or Godzilla movie to see serious acting – it's all about the spectacle. On the other hand, you have movies like "1917."

If you're an aficionado of the technical aspects, acting virtuosity or great cinematography, there are movies out there for you, even if they don't get the attention they should.

I agree with that.

But its so frustrating for people like me that DO appreciate BOTH types of film but rarely find ones that combine both aspects.

I like action, horror movies, superheros, AND a good script, good acting, good dialogue and intelligent

Like you said there are a few out there but they are so rare and you really have to dig into the reviews and be selective.

Although I grew up on comic books, horror movies, action heros, etc., and I always get excited when those types of movies come out, but am so often very disappointed. I can't even sit through movies like Transformers and GI Joe, despite having been a huge fan of the toys and comic books as a kid.

Hollywood obviously knows you can crank out action/horror/superhero type movies with weak scripts, acting, etc and people will still storm the theatres every time but its too bad for the minority of us who appreciate good film too.

They do make really good ones occasionally (ie Lord of the Rings, X-men, Hurtlocker, Harry Potter, etc) but hate hearing the excuse, well what do you expect? It's a "pop corn" movie or if you want to see a well made movie you can watch "The Kings Speech" (SNORE).

A few years ago, I interviewed a candidate for a position that I needed to hire someone for. This person dressed and presented himself well, and appeared to have good social skills. Coincidentally, he had graduated from the same college that I graduated from, and went through the same program that I did. So I was familiar with what he had been taught. My interview questions were heavily slanted toward the Engineering basics that I had been taught in college and that applied to the job that I was hiring someone for (my old position). This guy should have had a distinct advantage.

As I asked this candidate a standard list of technical questions that I had prepared in advance for things that he should have been capable of answering correctly, he couldn't come up with the correct answers to many of the questions for even the basics. And yet he seemed to understand many of the concepts, in general. At one point, he jokingly said "can I call a friend?". I knew that if I would have asked him to look up the answers on his phone, that he could have answered every question correctly because he did have a grasp on the concepts. He didn't get the job. I saw this same attribute in several others who I interviewed for that same position. I suspect that they didn't commit to memory, the information that they knew they could readily access at any time (probably from Google or Wikipedia). The person who got the job had everything that first guy had (except he graduated from somewhere else), plus he answered all of the technical questions correctly from memory. There were only ten questions. It was sad to see some candidates who with an Associates or higher degree in electronics who couldn't write the equation for ohm's law out on paper from memory.

Someone who works with me and was assisting with those interviews gave my test of ten questions to his wife when he got home that night. She has no degrees in electronics and did better on my test than some of the people that who we interviewed that day did. We had a good laugh about that.

When I asked questions when I was young I was often told to "look it up for yourself. You'll remember it longer."

I may use google several times a day. I look for more details about something I read or maybe just want to see a picture of something I'm reading about. Often one search leads to another.

Other times I use google to get the latest update or confirm information.

I think google makes us smarter overall.

The question becomes do we pass over information we don't think we'll need ir use? We don't have to retain everything anymore.

I think google has changed how we process and retain information.

So we're not more stupid. We're more selective.

Google made me skeptical, not stupid.

When I realized that so-called reliable sources sometimes lie with no remorse, I became a full-on skeptic, taking NOTHING at face value.

Those two ladies at The Dollar Store maybe could have checked with Google about the legitimacy of the million dollar bill they proffered as payment for their ...

I can state with confidence that Google did not make EOD stupid.

Uh oh ... *LOL*

Low-hanging fruit.

Google isn’t just facts. It’s also conspiracy theories and woo. Mormonism made me dumb. Google made me dumber.

Writing was a quantum leap in retaining and spreading information. Plato viewed writing with alarm, worried it made us dumber because we no longer had to memorize pretty much all knowledge. His fear appears to have been overblown.

Then came printing in the 15th century. Suddenly damn near anyone could afford to buy a book. Horrors. “Those people” shouldn’t be allowed to read. Nothing good could come of that. Martin Luther, who prior to printing would have been a local pain in the ass, became a best-selling author, and look where that lead!

And now we can carry in our hand more access to information than any encyclopedia ever published could ever hope to deliver. Got a DIY project where you are not sure how to proceed? YouTube it.


Plato was wrong then. The current Cassandras are wrong now. Yeah, sometimes we are stupid. Google may amplify that, but it doesn’t cause it.

I sometimes try to remember the time when information was not at our fingertips. If I was in search of information about a given topic, I had to schedule a library trip. There was a greater incentive for me to buy and keep books.

I think that now I tend to read more narrowly. Back then, I read more widely (books, newspapers, magazines) because you never knew when you would need a small piece of information. Now you can just look it up quickly and easily.

It may not be verifiable, but it is likely that Google has ‘gunshot’ the mormon church when it comes to growing the church via missionary conversions.

Will Google and the internet reverse the numbers game of the mormon church? I say yes!

Let me put this is slightly different terms:

Reading to understand a given subject matter takes a great deal of preparation and effort. It requires, (1) identifying the right source material that is appropriate for one's level of competence; (2) reading such material carefully to absorb the facts, inferences and arguments contained therein; (3) digressing from time to time to other materials in order to fill in the gaps of understanding and perspective made evident from one's primary source; and (4) increasing one's understanding by moving to a higher or broader level of presentation.

The internet, by contrast, encourages acquiring 'knowledge' by information soundbite. Rather than carefully perusing sources, and getting knee-deep in facts and arguments, one can quickly acquire and adopt a shallow, single perspective that one can then take to be definitive and authoritative. Real understanding is never achieved. The value of such an approach is that after one acquires an extensive library of informational soundbites, they can go on social media and leave the impression of substantial knowledge (and even wisdom), when the reality is that their understanding is superficial, and their opinions are imbedded in a sea of ignorance.

There should be a proper balance between the above two extremes. The unfortunate reality--it seems to me--is that the second approach is becoming more and more dominant, while the first approach, even in its less extreme form, is found only within narrowly defined academic programs where at the end of the day one's sources are often dictated by some paradigm, and one's opinions naturally follow from that paradigm.

(Note: it is particularly telling and sometimes amusing when two people of this second category engage in heated and sometimes personal exchanges on RfM regarding matters neither one of them know anything about.)

Parrots!

They can say a lot, over and over over, but you know they don’t comprehend what they are parroting!

I usually remember the info I find on google in terms of my job. I look up things every time I work as doctors will say some new phrase and you have to make sure it fits what you are typing or there is some new name for a surgical tool, new medication name. We had to look everything up in books when I first started doing medical transcription. We got a new copy of medications from a printer once every quarter or so. Google has been a godsend to me.

But I very seldom don't remember what I found on google.

I find it pretty sad--and HOW are these guys supposed to do their jobs if they don't retain information? If you don't learn to in school, you are going to have to remember info on the job.

Whatever happened to working with someone who is honest and eager to learn? Whatever happened to patience and compassion?

I am appalled by finance, banking, and payroll departments that use the “teach a man to fish” excuse to escape having to perform good customer service.

How have we let people like that shame us into learning how to do their job?

Do we shame people into learning how to do our job?

Responsibility is tough.
Gotta blame somebody (or something). Some outfit calling itself Chumbawamba even made a tune out of it.

;-)

I'll have to look that one up and find out

I blame calculators. They started the whole thing. OR was it the Abacus that started the "cheat?" The calculator thing started just after me in school luckily and I can still do math without one.

Damn new fangled inventions. Like Smith Barney I still do everything the old fashioned way. (Cuz I can't get this iPhone to work at all.)

And I bet your VCR is still flashing 12:00...:-)

VCR?

Are they still around?

D&D's is still around.

In fact, he has a stack of four or five--and there's a Betamax machine in there too.

Until I was 10 we still had a black box on the wall for a phone that you wound for the operator. We didn't need no stinking numbers. "Hi Phyllis. I want talk to my cousin Laurie." "Hold on. I'll connect you." You can't beat that!

Course the people in California already had Princes phones. The rotaries were good. I like something I can stick my finger into.

EOD likes it when you lick your finger and stick it in his ear. Try it and he'll follow you around like a dog in a candy shop.

I'm a very simple dog, with very simple tastes, and not a lot of ambition, which makes being 'satisfied' quite easy.

Plus Saucie gives me treats...

One way out of our shared environmental catastrophe is to simply not notice it. It’s a short way out, and in the end not an out at all, obviously, but not noticing has its perks.

One way of not noticing is to strike words for the things of nature right out of our children’s mouths. Take “beech” and “bluebell” out of the Oxford Junior Dictionary and add “broadband” and “block-graph”. That’s progress.

O, that lone flower recalled to me
My happy childhood's hours
When bluebells seemed like fairy gifts
A prize among the flowers,

Charlotte and Emily’s sister Anne wrote that, remembering her childhood. What child today needs a fairy’s gift of a lone bluebell when AI grants them such boons as “blog” and “bulletpoint”?



Nicholas Carr, in the delightfully named “Wind-fucking” (2015), elaborates:

~~~
[Robert] Macfarlane’s piece, drawn from his forthcoming book Landmarks, was inspired by the discovery that a great dictionary for kids, the Oxford Junior Dictionary, is being pruned of words describing the stuff of the natural world. Being inserted in their place are words describing the abstractions and symbols of the digital and bureaucratic spheres:

“Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, and willow. The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player, and voice-mail.”

They yanked out bluebell and put in bullet-point? What shit-asses.

The substitutions made in the dictionary — the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual — are a small but significant symptom of the simulated life we increasingly live. Children are now (and valuably) adept ecologists of the technoscape, with numerous terms for file types but few for different trees and creatures. A basic literacy of landscape is falling away up and down the ages.
As Macfarlane goes on to say, the changes in the dictionary don’t just testify to our weakening grasp on nature.

Something else is being lost: “a kind of word magic, the power that certain terms possess to enchant our relations with nature and place.”
~~~


Progress is striking enchantment from our being. Forget a fairy’s bluebell and embrace Google’s algorithms. There’s the “nectar” that keeps on giving.

Pixels for pastures and waveforms for the wind in the willows: this equals progress. Newts and otters, kingfishers and heron, larks and adders, even the beech and the fern, what care these that we think so little of them that we can’t even be bothered to teach our children their names?

Just ask Alexa, enchantment is a romantic delusion.

Human


Carr’s note, Wind-fucking:

http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5963

Robert MacFarlane’s essay, Landspeak:

https://orionmagazine.org/article/landspeak/

Margaret Atwood et. al. Letter to Oxford Dictionaries:

http://www.naturemusicpoetry.com/uploads/2/9/3/8/29384149/letter_to_oup_final.pdf

I think Google is a good source for raw scientific information, but is terrible if you are looking for unbiased news or information outside of the sciences. When the search field auto-completes with what you're looking for, you know that many other people have asked that same question that you're asking and you'll likely get results based on what someone else wants you to believe on the topic, true or false. The ecosystem is managed, not really free and unbiased.

And even in the sciences, when you get deep in to some topics you can hit dead-ends. If you use an appropriate buzz-word, you get a thousand hits with much the same information. If you're looking for something less generic and with slightly more advanced information, tough luck. You get the sixth grade version that was written by a journalist who doesn't quite understand the topic themselves. Sometimes boolean operators help narrow the search. Sometimes you just get the same garbage over and over until you stop using the buzzword, at which point you get nothing close to what you're looking for. When that happens, I think it's because no one or very few people have ever asked the same question.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/20/2021 10:51AM by azsteve.

I Googled the question and got this answer: "Dave, stop. Stop, will you, Dave? I am afraid."

For someone who is older, Google is great. My friend and I were Skyping and neither of us could remember the name of the great newscaster we loved so. A quick Google--it was Walter Cronkite.

And that movie star from that movie we talked about? Oh yeah, Tom Cruise.

Now, if Google will be able to help us find our car keys. . .

www.duckduckgo.com

Always fresh from personalized algorithms.

Some of us were stupid before Google.

HH =)