I wanted to touch on the topic we discussed a few days ago with the "Google is making us stupid" article. There is really no way to measure the affect on google on the entire population, but we can make good guesses based on certain cases. When Carr quotes Karp and Friedman, two persons well versed in literature according to Carr, this evidence really puts in to words something I've noticed myself. I'm beginning to read books the way I read online, in short bursts. I have diagnosed attention deficit disorder and I have trouble listening and reading one thing for too long. It's a trade off though because when I get into something I'm interested in, I hyperfocus for a short burst of time which can be personally rewarding. It's not a big deal, but ADD does affect almost everything I do. But I feel like more and more people are beginning to have ADD of some kind. This makes me wonder, are we being conditioned by society and by basically ourselves to have short attention spans? This is basically the argument Carr is making. Will our education system then adapt to this new way of thinking? I can personally say that a short attention span and our current education system do not mesh. I don't think either the person or the system are at fault. But something has to be changed in one or the other won't survive.
But we can't forget that google has revolutionized the way information is gained and shared. It's truly incredible the hieghts technology has taken us to. But we have to be careful with all this new power, it might make us stoopid.
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