On "is Google making us stupid?"
Today, a friend posted the question on her Facebook about a paper she needed to write: "Is Google making us stupid?" Below is my response.
Google has changed the name of the game in the socio-intellectual fields. As a culture, we are engaging this mentality that you don't need to KNOW information, but you must be trained to access, identify, evaluate, and utilize information. This ideological shift should not be disdained merely because it's different from the old ways- there are still intellectually smart people who do not need Google to win at trivia games. Those natural intellectuals are the people that rise above nonetheless. However, you do see that those who previously did not have the intellectual capacity but may have had the artistic flare, are now able to compete with those who are intellectually above them. Is this a good thing? I would say, it's a better thing. As we look back on church history, we see that people did have not a true understanding of Catholicism and faith because they could not read the Bible for themselves. (Now, people still do not have a true understanding of Catholicism and faith because they read everything but the Bible.) Once they received the Bible in common print, in common tongue, they did not have to rely on others to relay them their religious information and suddenly we had the Reformation. Here we are: we are at the threshold of the Intellectual Reformation. We all now have the power to read information, like those who were on the coat-tails of the Gutenberg's mass printing of the Bible, and we are merely waiting on our modern Martin Luther to nail 95 Tweets to the Front Door of the Academe. From there, we shall see how the cards fall. Will we have one united Academe, reformed in the name of analytic skills, or will we be rent in two as those who seek to preserve the old ways try to stifle the new movement?