

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - razorburn
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

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noonespecial
I do find that I no longer read through things (especially opinion pieces)
with that sense of "truncated thought" whenever I come to a questionable
assertion or statistic.

It used to be that I'd feel an uneasy _is that right?_ feeling at these points
and try to remember to check that out later. Now I'm very likely to pop google
open next to the piece and check immediately.

Very often things I'm reading "strike out" with a few bogus assertions or
statistics and don't get read all the way through.

Reading anything without google except fiction where I wish to suspend
disbelief feels weird now.

Google makes us smarter, not stupid, because it allows our brain to be an L1
cache instead of the entire store.

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rw
It's the breaking-up of essays into 4 or more web pages that irritates and
turns off the reader...

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izaidi
It's wrong to say technology is making thought more shallow. What's happening
is the digestion of information is becoming a heavily collaborative process
instead of a strictly personal one.

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gojomo
Read the whole thing... if you still can.

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Xichekolas
I was gonna read the whole thing, but the first rambling paragraph bored me
and I got distracted by something on newegg.

(On a serious note: what a linkbait headline!)

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LPTS
No.

TV is making people stupid.

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mechanical_fish
No, it was _reading_ that made people stupid. We just can't memorize epic
poems the way we used to.

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Hexstream
How can you assess that the epic poem was memorized (correctly) if you don't
have a written record of the original version (I'll assume where there's
reading there's writing)? Maybe it wasn't even epic at first.

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mechanical_fish
Actually, I vaguely remember reading about a study of bards which showed that
-- surprise, surprise -- thousand-line epic poems _aren't_ memorized word-for-
word. Certain famous lines are memorized, the overall plot is memorized, the
meter may or may not be fixed... but a bunch of the details end up being
improvised. Fans of folk music or jazz should be completely unsurprised by
this.

The moral of this story is that the identity and talent of the person
"transcribing" an epic poem into print -- or playing that folk music into the
recorder -- are really important.

Of course, perhaps a dedicated critic of writing would laugh at the absurd
notion that an epic poem whose words _were exactly the same at every
performance_ was somehow "more correct". Why, if you standardize the words,
the art is gone! That's the approach taken by dedicated fans of concert music
and jazz: it's the little differences in interpretation and approach that make
each performance fresh and unique.

