Holding in your head information that is easily discoverable on Google will no longer be a mark of intelligence, but a side-show act. By , we will have even more access to even more information, using even more sophisticated search and retrieval tools — but how smartly we can make use of this potential depends on whether our media literacies and capacities have caught up, too.
I am not stupid compared to my grandfather, but I believe the development of my brain has been changed by the availability of technology. The same will happen or is happening as a result of the Googleization of knowledge. People are becoming used to bite sized chunks of information that are compiled and sorted by an algorithm. This must be having an impact on our brains, but it is too simplistic to say that we are becoming stupid as a result of Google.
Other skills may diminish. I agree with Carr that we may on the average become less patient, less willing to read through a long, linear text, but we may also become more adept at dealing with multiple factors….
The internet and search engines just enable people to be more of what they already are. If they are motivated to learn and shrewd, they will use new tools to explore in exciting new ways. If they are lazy or incapable of concentrating, they will find new ways to be distracted and goof off. There is a trend, of course, toward instant analysis and knee-jerk responses to events that degrades a lot of writing and discussion. Google is my friend. Of course, the kind of Googled future that I am concerned about is the one in which my every desire is anticipated, and my every fear avoided by my guardian Google.
Even then, I might not be stupid, just not terribly interesting. On the whole, having easy access to more information will make society as a group smarter though. The Neolithic revolution brought the substitution of some human physical work by animal work. The Industrial revolution brought more substitution of human physical work by machine work. The Digital revolution is implying a significant substitution of human brain work by computers and ICTs in general.
Whenever a substitution has taken place, men have been able to focus on more qualitative tasks, entering a virtuous cycle: the more qualitative the tasks, the more his intelligence develops; and the more intelligent he gets, more qualitative tasks he can perform….
As obesity might be the side-effect of physical work substitution my machines, mental laziness can become the watermark of mental work substitution by computers, thus having a negative effect instead of a positive one. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. This has already become a big problem in university classrooms. For my undergrad majors in Communication Studies, Google may take over the hard work involved in finding good source material for written assignments.
Unless pushed in the right direction, students will opt for the top 10 or 15 hits as their research strategy.
It will reinforce certain dispositions in the end-user: stronger intellects will use Google as a creative tool, while others will let Google do the thinking for them. The potential for stupidity comes where we rely on Google or Yahoo, or Bing, or any engine to provide relevant information in response to poorly constructed queries, frequently one-word queries, and then base decisions or conclusions on those returned items.
For some, Google will let them find useless content that does not challenge their minds. But for others, Google will lead them to expect answers to questions, to explore the world, to see and think for themselves. For example, I have a hunch about something, need facts to support, and Google comes through for me. Not all of that data is useful or correct. I suspect the amount of misleading data is increasing faster than the amount of correct data.
There should also be a distinction made between data and information. Data is meaningless in the absence of an organizing context. That means that different people looking at the same data are likely to come to different conclusions. There is a big difference with what a world class artist can do with a paint brush as opposed to a monkey. In other words, the value of Google will depend on what the user brings to the game.
The value of data is highly dependent on the quality of the question being asked. The big struggle is over what kind of information Google and other search engines kick back to users. In the age of social media where users can be their own content creators it might get harder and harder to separate high-quality material from junk.
The current network is full of inaccurate, misleading, and biased information that often crowds out the valid information. These high-IQ, low-EQ individuals see the world as a meritocracy. Achievements are all that matter, and people and emotions just get in the way. Which is a shame because TalentSmart research with more than a million people shows that—even among the upper echelons of IQ—the top performers are those with the highest EQs.
They give up when they fail. Smart people can easily fall into the trap of seeing failure as the end of the world because frequent success creates expectations that make failure hard to tolerate. People who have to work hard for what they achieve have plenty of practice learning how to deal with failure.
They learn to embrace it because they know that failure is just a stepping stone to success. They fail to develop grit. They multitask. Smart people think really quickly, which can make them impatient.
They have a hard time accepting feedback. Smart people tend to undervalue the opinions of others, which means they have trouble believing that anyone is qualified to give them useful feedback. Not only does this tendency hinder their growth and performance, it can lead to toxic relationships, both personally and professionally.
How do you see smart people acting stupid? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me. This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here.
He died before his magnum opus was complete, and some attribute his sudden death, aged 58, to the frustration of researching the book. And yet, the sheer breadth of that spectrum raises many intriguing questions.
Or are there drawbacks to being clever that sometimes give slower thinkers the upper hand? And why are even the smartest people prone to — well, stupidity? It turns out that our usual measures of intelligence — particularly IQ — have very little to do with the kind of irrational, illogical behaviours that so enraged Flaubert.
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