WRAL Tech Wire

Is all that ‘Googling’ shorting out our brains? Could be.

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• Atlantic article about Google

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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. – Have you already “Googled” something today from your crackberry or other mobile device or your laptop or your desktop PC?

Going Googling is contagious, isn’t it? The world’s most powerful search engine and Internet company links us to what we seek in milliseconds.

So is Google also making us “stoopid”?

That’s the thrust of a fascinating cover story in the latest issue of Atlantic magazine by Nicholas Carr. (His latest book is “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison t0 Google.)

In so many ways, Google has become a crutch for us – just as Windows and other word processing programs have helped with such basics as grammar and spelling. If you don’t think you are addicted to Google, try to avoid using it for a day. Ok, 12 hours. Well, 3 hours. How about 60 minutes?

I sometimes do some work at a firm that doesn’t permit access to the Net, let alone Google. Among the few tools available is the company’s database as well as its own Web site. Neither supports Google, relying on some other search engine that is about as useful as a dialup modem these days.

I can’t live without Google – well, I can but it’s darn hard.

Make a list of the reasons why you go Googling and it’s likely to be a long one. But by using Google so much are we dumbing ourselves down to the point that getting information the old fashion way – you looked up words or spellings or topics with diligent if frustrating searches of such things as phone directories and dictionaries – is torture. Do we forget how certain words are spelled because Google is so intuitive it corrects us before we realize we’ve made a mistake?

Carr’s article goes much deeper than shortcuts, however. He discusses how our brains are apparently being affected by life on the Net. He’s concerned that he finds in-depth reading of books and lengthy articles to be a challenge.

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing,” he wrote. “I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.”

If you have made it to this point of the article without going on another Google hunt, congratulations because here’s the link to Carr’s fascinating article.

Have a Googling good day!

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