Today I stumbled upon this nice article, Is Google making us stupid? Talks about the effects today's search engines are having on our behavior. As we all know, we (at least most of us) don't read a dead tree book or do research in a 'real' library these days, we just JFGI, and at that too, we just skim till we land on the exact tidbit of our interest. And though it's efficient, the author warns that this habit of going for quick wins is already having measurable adverse effects on our mental abilities (like ability to concentrate).
I agree with the overall point of the article (not the least because I have observed myself doing the same kind of thing, I mean JFGI). But what I liked most was that the author is not just a nostalgic whiner, he points out how writing and printing both were criticized by scholars of the age when they were introduced, and although the things feared by critics have come true to an extent, the boons far outweigh their problems. We can hope that the boons of the Net will also outweigh it's problems.
But hey, we can at least minimize these effects (and avoid the 'reprogramming of our minds', as the author puts it). So here is my current status, "Out for some offline reading".
[The original article is a bit long and to be honest, I must admit that I had to make a conscious effort to read it in full (and not just skim it), the effect is there after all :-)].
I agree with the overall point of the article (not the least because I have observed myself doing the same kind of thing, I mean JFGI). But what I liked most was that the author is not just a nostalgic whiner, he points out how writing and printing both were criticized by scholars of the age when they were introduced, and although the things feared by critics have come true to an extent, the boons far outweigh their problems. We can hope that the boons of the Net will also outweigh it's problems.
But hey, we can at least minimize these effects (and avoid the 'reprogramming of our minds', as the author puts it). So here is my current status, "Out for some offline reading".
[The original article is a bit long and to be honest, I must admit that I had to make a conscious effort to read it in full (and not just skim it), the effect is there after all :-)].
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