Just Google It - [website] Published: 17th of Jun 2011 by: (c) Staff Training Reporter
Technology is progressing at a rate of knots these days, the internet is endlessly expanding and communication has never before been this simple. This must mean we’re getting cleverer, right?
You’d think so, but I’m not so sure.
It worries me that we (the people who eat, sleep and breathe online) no longer need to think for ourselves, know how to spell or have an attention span that lasts longer than 30 seconds. It worries me that kids at school let MS Word auto-correct their spelling and grammar and it worries me that any question you could possibly conceive is simply typed into Google and then considered resolved.
We have become an intensely distracted society, needing constant stimulation or we lose focus and concentration. We no longer read books and newspapers but rather scan text riddled with links, clicking on to the next one before finishing the first.
Many of us cannot imagine our lives without Google, let alone the internet, but what is it doing to the way we think? In my opinion it’s stopping us from actually questioning what we learn (or read) and in parrot fashion we just repeat what Google’s told us (heaven forbid Google gets it wrong….).
And it’s the same if not worse for children. School projects require no real research anymore, no going to the library and reading up on topics and no more long afternoons poring over newspaper clippings. Just ask Google.
And when it comes time to write up the report for school the text editor will let you know if you’ve spelt anything wrong or if your syntax is incorrect, and will then offer to correct it for you.
In a perfect world this would cause no problem, but what it’s actually doing is stopping our kids from learning the correct spellings of words, or why Word suggests they try their sentence another way. It’s all too easy to just accept that the computer is right and click ‘auto-correct’ every time.
But it’s not the progression of technology that I’m against, it’s just the way we use it that I think is potentially harmful.
Research has shown that people who read text from a book take in more than those who read text punctuated with links, people who learn from multimedia presentations absorb less than those who learn in a more sedate, focussed manner, and people who are constantly inundated with emails and updates understand less than those who are able to concentrate.
We seem to be trying to do everything at once: check our mail, attend a meeting, send out an update on the Roger account and gulp our morning coffee before it gets cold, and in the process we end up doing a half-arsed job of it.
The point is that we need to slow down and focus a bit more – no one gets anything done when they’re trying to do everything at once – and we need to start thinking for ourselves again – getting all the answers from the net may be quick but it’s essentially counter-productive; we’re losing the ability to think for ourselves.
