Look out, Google is making us all stupid, claims author

http://www.broadbandgenie.co.uk/news/20100913-google-causes-brain-damage-author-claims

From BroadbandGenie, 13 Sep 2010
by Katie Theisinger

Beware, internet users - using Google to find information, far from providing you with more knowledge about the world, could actually be making you stupider!

You might be forgiven for thinking that having a wealth of information at your fingertips might make people better informed, but in fact the opposite is true - at least according to Nicolas Carr, author of 'The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains'.

Carr's latest work builds on ideas which he first published in the article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our brains"; and suggests that by making information readily available and easy to find, Google is actually removing the need to use our brains, and thereby diminishing our intellectual capacities. He suggests that the accessibility of information via the internet is having a negative impact on users' ability to concentrate and contemplate.

Carr suggests that making sites like Google more difficult to use would help us to give our brains the work-out they need to keep sharp; adding that he believes Google has a 'narrow view' of the way we should be using our minds. “They have this view that everything's about how efficiently you can find that particular bit of information you need – and then move on to the next," he says, adding "When you think about how we're coming to depend on software for all sorts of intellectual chores, for finding information, for socialising - you need to start worrying that it's not giving us, as individuals, enough room to act for ourselves."

Of course, Harvard-educated Carr is no stranger to creating controversy with his ideas - his 2003 Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn't Matter" prompted an outcry from the IT industry; and in 2005 he followed that up with an attack on 'The Amorality of Web 2.0', criticising the likes of Wikipedia for displacing 'real' information channels with user generated content.