Tough question. From the best I can tell the answer depends on the task at hand. Google, along with several other Internet-based technologies, has notably transformed not only how we access information but also how we interact with others regarding information as well as how we create knowledge based on information. For many tasks, these changes could easily lead us to the conclusion that people are becoming dumber thanks to tools like Google. After all, they have significantly altered the conventional competencies we routinely associate with success in modern society.
Ryan Watkins, Associate Professor, George Washington University. Web: www.ryanrwatkins.com
Ryan Watkins, Associate Professor, George Washington University. Web: www.ryanrwatkins.com
College students today, for example, rarely go to the library in search of books, periodicals, journals, and other traditional reference materials for use in their term papers. Instead they commonly rely on Internet search tools to find available wikis, blogs, podcasts, and other nontraditional sources of information. Sometimes they find accurate and worthwhile information to guide their thinking; often, however, they fail to even scratch the surface of the information, knowledge, and wisdom that is available, but not on the Internet. Limiting our ideas solely to those that are easily found online does little to advance our abilities to create knowledge from information. In this way, tools like Google may be making us dumber.
Our easy access to the vast amount of information available online provides us with a valuable, yet precarious, resource. While Google search results may provide us with quick access to information on most any topic, at most any time, from most any location; many of us are easily lulled into a false confidence regarding the quality and breadth of information we get back from our searches. We often forget that Google, as a private, for-profit company, is in the business of pushing content to us using the always coveted first-linesearch-return that was routinely sold to the highest bidder. Likewise, online tools like Wikipedia can inflate our sense of information quality, as the openness of the tool, a characteristic that makes it especially comprehensive, can be its greatest liability when it comes to the quality of information.
Our false confidence in the quality of information available on the Internet may also come from a continuing perception that anything that is published must be of quality. After all, just 2 decades ago published media were limited to the tight controls of a few publishing companies that maintained a large staff of quality-control editors. Today, however, most anyone can publish their thoughts and ideas to the Internet; regardless of the quality, accuracy, biases, or other characteristics that each of us must weigh when determining what information we should use when making decisions or building knowledge.
Nevertheless, as we continually modernize the standards used to judge a person’s capacity to be successful, we quickly find that tools such as Google are likewise transforming the corresponding competencies. The knowledge and skills that were precursors of success just a few years ago are no longer the minimal standards that we can apply today to judge competence. From selecting the right search tools for the task to accurately assessing the quality of information, the competencies being developed by Internet users today may give them the capacity to be smarter than any generation in the past.
Developing effective skills for identifying, accessing, comprehending, analyzing, and evaluating information that is available online have therefore become essential to those who will be successful in our connected world. From efficiently using online library databases to applying systematic evaluation criteria to Web articles, the skill set of Google users must grow beyond keyword searches to include a comprehensive approach to managing the volume, quality, and usefulness of information that is now available.
In the future, as the traditional resources for building knowledge move into more publicly available online formats, tools like Google have the opportunity to expand access to information for people around the world. In doing this they can add valuable new dimensions to the standards we use to define a person’s capacity for success; or, as is the case today, they can provide only a limited view of the information, knowledge, and wisdom the world has to offer. These are not, however, decisions for Google to make alone. As is characteristically the case with most Internet-based technologies, the users of the Internet will determine the fate of Google, the fate of knowledge, as well as the fate of our own intellects. When used poorly, tools like Google can limit our perspectives; when used wisely, these tools can complement, update, and even expand the information that we will hopefully transform into knowledge and wisdom to be shared with others.
