Custom «Is Google Making Us Stupid» Essay Paper Sample

The aim of this paper is to carry out a survey based on the evidence presented to decide whether or not; Google is making humans stupid. The internet and Google in particular, have been considered as some of the greatest inventions by mankind. However, in spite of all its fame and glory, Google might be making us stupid.

Technology is said to be the hands-on application of science to commerce or industry. Technology is designed in many forms, and few routines of our day to day lives are unaffected by technology. Since the industrial revolution, technological development has been meteoric. Hours and years of scientific research and painstaking study have been paid off with the technologies that revolve around our societies. Technology has created a new form of addiction for its users. Addiction is a term describing a physical or physiological dependence on something habit forming. Studies show that individuals consume up to eleven hours of media per day, paralleled to four hours in 1960. Expanding revenue in the industrialized world has led to an escalation in the number of people able to purchase personal computers, and link them to the World Wide Web. This has created severe addiction for social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. The biggest brunt of internet addiction falls on young children and adolescents who spend most of their hours playing video games, watching television and socializing on internet sites at the expense of their studies. Communication and socializing are unknown to some people as a result of their reliance on technological media. The stepped-up ef%uFB01ciency of instant messaging and social networking has created problems at the workplace. Concern has been raised over employees using up to forty minutes per week on social schmoozing internet sites during working hours, costing firms approximately two point five billion dollars per annum. The loss in efficiency arises from both the direct reduction in working hours and from the decline in output of workers who are constantly distracted by social media (Carr).

The writer uses ethos to appeal to the reader’s emotion and share his complains of memory loss, stress, detrimental changes in lifestyle and habits. Users of the net complain of inability to think or perform mental activities as they did before the advent of the internet revolution. The writer attracts the reader’s sympathy when he complains of not being able to read lengthy books or stories as he used to in the past. According to him, he feels as though something or someone was tinkering with his brain. This has cost him his memory and concentration on lengthy articles. Like most of the internet users, the writer is afraid that he may be addicted to the Internet.

The writer, by use of facts, claims that overdependence and addiction to the internet is a common problem to millions of people throughout the developed world. The writer is especially appalled by people’s inability to concentrate on a paper that is more than three pages long. In spite of the fact that widespread exposure to the internet increases time spent reading or skimming through articles, the writer complains that the method and purpose of reading has drastically changed. The use of pathos (quoting expert advice) is used by the author who cites Mrs. Maryanne Wolf, a developmental Psychologist at the Truth University. The professor claims that human beings are not only what they read but also the way they read. This means that the human technique of reading and engaging in Knowledge partaking activities adversely affects them. Since reading is not an inborn skill, we have to teach our brains to assimilate, analyze, interpret and store information. The media that we use to get knowledge and information plays a central role in shaping the neutral circuits inside our brains.

Other logical explanations as to why Google is making us stupid include the measure of effects of the internet on human cognition. The internet is an immeasurably powerful computer system that has taken over most of the other intellectual media such as books, magazines and newspapers. The internet can provide all the services of our previous technologies such as clocks, radio, television, maps and calculators. The clutches of the internet reach further into our society than we may decipher. For instance, the need for efficiency and immediacy has spread even to newspapers. The New York Times dedicated its second and third pages to short abstracts of the stories contained in the rest of the newspaper. According to the editor in charge, this development came up in order to create ease of reading. In my opinion, that was a move inspired by the laziness of today’s readers (Carr).

The internet is a machine designed for efficient and automated collection, transmission and manipulation of information in the most effective and cost efficient method. The Google search engine collects thousands of pieces of information every day, organizes it and converts it into something useful. The company’s mission is to consolidate the world’s data and make it collectively accessible and useful. The founders of Google have been frequently heard speaking of their mission to transform their search engine into an artificial intelligence machine that can tap into the brain for additional information. Mr. Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google, was quoted Speaking of an ultimate search engine that would be better than the human brain. Such an ambitious project for a pair of math whizzes is, however, a tad bit unsettling. The notion that knowledge is the yield of a technical process, a sequence of discrete steps that can be secluded, measured and augmented is utterly false. Human brains are not programmed to operate as high speed data processing techniques.

In conclusion, I agree with the writer’s sentiments that Google, is making people stupid. The change in reading habits and the way knowledge is absorbed represents a downward trend. The increased access to internet resources all over the world has changed a lot of lives. The internet has made access to the information, communication and learning easy. It has also made people all over the world lazy and less dedicated to the search of knowledge. In essence, Google is making us stupid.