Listening to Buzz Out Loud (cnet’s best podcast), they mentioned an interesting article on Mashable.com by Stan Schroeder titled: Why Google is Making Us Dumber.
Now before I totally rip into this idea, let me make it clear that I’m not ripping on Mr. Schroeder, as his article makes it clear that he isn’t convinced that this is an absolute truth. Rather, I’ll just call out the morons who think progress means we are dumber than our parents.
So some people claim that Google is making us stupid because we can rely on it to give us information; we no longer need to memorize our times tables, how to convert temperatures from fahrenheit to celcius, or what countries border Chile. We can now simply plug our question into Google and be showered with the right answer.
So does this make us stupid? After all, we don’t know the capital of Estonia off the top of our heads; if there were ever trivia-savvy terrorists holding us hostage and ready to kill us unless we can spout random geography facts…we would all be fucked (well, that is, unless somebody has a web browser on their cell phone…)
So yes…this instant-information age has led us to memorizing less information. Because we do not have to. Why would I spend my time memorizing the capitals of all 50 states when I can google that information in less than 10 seconds? I have better things to do with my time (lolcats and askaninja come to mind).
Isn’t the use of Google and other websites considered to be the use of a tool? Isn’t learning how to use a tool more important to intelligence than memorizing simple facts? Doesn’t that represent critical thinking and problem solving? Rote memorization is for parakeets.
Good lord this post sucked. My brain has shut down (must be all the googleing i’ve been doing). My apologies if you had to read this…but I think you get the gist.
