People can remember fewer information than before! Why?
The use of internet has grown dramatically in recent 10 years. People are uploading great amount of data including emails, photos and articles into the public domain, and have formed a huge platform. The internet has become a platform that generating information and data, every minute giant amounts of it are being generated from the internet users. Every minute, YouTube users are uploading 48 hours of video, Facebook users are sharing 684,478 pieces of content, while Tumblr is having 27,778 new posts published (Neil 2012). What an unbelievable amount!
Data is a vast, endless regiment of recorded facts and figures (Siegel 2013). Every picture, Facebook post, movie recommendation, each successful or failed sales call, each incident, event, and transaction-is encoded as data and stored online. When people want to find some specific information online, they can just type in some keywords on a searching engine, the internet would soon list out thousands of web pages, images or files for users.
Google is, as you all know, the largest search engine, it is fast and relevant, especially its Google 'images', 'maps' and 'news' features, are really outstanding services. Google’s stated mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Pingdom 2010). Google has nearly 70% of market share in the world. Its services include YouTube, Gmail, Google Map and Twitter. Google has, perhaps more than any other company, realized that information is power. By collecting huge amount of data, Google can make market decisions, research, refine its products, anything. For example, Google can discover what people are looking for, what people want, and make decisions based on those discoveries. People may not be paying Google with dollars, but we are paying with information.
Although the internet has been developed around for just 20 years, it is hard to imagine life without it. It has given us instant access to vast amounts of information. Yesterday I was cooking my dinner and wondered how to make chicken curry, so I immediately went to my computer and Googled it. The internet has provided a convenient way to look for information. And I have a question: how did people get answers before internet developed? Before, if people wanted to find news, they would turn on the radio. When people tried to cook chicken curry, they would buy a cookbook. Nowadays, people are more likely to Google all their question. However, there are researches show that when people have access to search engines, they remember fewer facts and less information because they just have to remember who ( internet )knows it (Bejar 2011). For instance drivers do not have to remember the map because the GPS devices can guide us all the way. Undoubtedly, computer can help us a lot, but sometimes it may also bring some negative consequences.
References list
Bejar, Daniel. 2011. “ How the web affect memory.” Harvard Magazine. Accessed December 11, 2011.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/11/how-the-web-affects-memory
Neil, Spencer. 2012. “How much data is created every minute?” Visual News. Accessed June 19, 2012.
http://www.visualnews.com/2012/06/19/how-much-data-created-every-minute/
Siegel, Eric, (2013). Introduction : The Prediction Effect. In Siegel, Eric, Predictive analytics : the power to predict who will click, buy, lie, or die, (pp.1 - 16). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Pingdom. 2010. “How Google collect data about you and internet”. Royal Pingdom. Accessed January 8, 2010.
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/01/08/how-google-collects-data-about-you-and-the-internet/