"Is Google making us stupid" or lazy?

• "Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle." [Is Google making us stupid?. Article by Nicholas Carr.  Published by Atlantic Monthly. August/September 2008]
  

I feel the same way. Nicholas Carr is describing something that is spreading all over the world. Down here in Brazil, for instance, it's all going in the same direction. People read less books and newspapers or magazines. Scientific articles are read only until the point that matters. More and more of what we read comes from the web. A few searches on Google and most people think that we the job is already done. And even on doing so we are doing just half way of what we were supossed to be doing... The majority of the people simply read a few paragraphs or lines and feel as if all the information they needed is already handy...

Besides that there is the "jumping from one site to another" practice going on. Of course that this coming and going on the web is quite fast. People don't spend more than one, two or three minutes the most in one webpage.

The implications go not only in the direction of written texts... The rise of YouTube and similars are making our brains get used to short video productions. The patience to watch a movie, two hour lenght, is getting shorter... This is quite a worry because, after all, a film should be not only a cultural device but entertainment in the first hand... If we are not willing to enjoy something so popular and fun such as a movie what are we going to do with reading, listening to music, going to the teather and so on? How is our relation with all of those cultural devices be built in a very near future?

On regarding the question made by Carr on his article I must say that we are lazier than ever as a first consequence on the excessive use of Google and internet devices. But just as he believes as a fact for this right moment, people turning out to be stupid, I think it is something that is being built on an everyday basis and I foresee it's major consequences for the years to come right ahead, when the generations born after the internet boom become the majority of the working class...

By João Luís de Almeida Machado