Lots has been written about whether the Internet is making us dumber or smarter.

Dumbing down society, wiping out history, old media is being forced to play by new media rules, the net is re-programming us, Google is like McDonalds, we’re losing the ability to read are just some of the charges levied at the Internet, Google, You Tube & Wikipedia…..

This is a really interesting subject so I thought it would be worth trying to pull together some of the posts i’ve come across. Hopefully this might help people make their own minds up, assuming you are able to read any of them in any detail

1. Is Google Making us Stupid?, by Nicholas Carr

2. Google: Making Nick Carr Stupid, But It’s Made This Guy Smarter, by John Battelle - some interesting comments have been added to this post both agreeing and disagreeing with Nick Carr’s article. Interestingly Google is compared to McDonalds - “Google is to information retrieval as McDonald’s is to food”,  ”the first bite tastes great, but the rest is empty calories”¹. Much is also written about search terms of 2-3 words which deliver a widely focused result that is shallow (therefore mostly useless) as opposed to something that is narrow and deep (and more beneficial).²

3. Google is making your dumber from The Business Week debate room presents two contrasting views from Jacob Neilsen and David Alan Grier. The argument essentially boils down to fragmented facts delivered by Google mean the web is not a great learning environment (Neilsen) vs access to more information stimulates us and makes us think more deeply about the world (Grier).

4. A briefing paper commissioned by the British Library highlights the skills gap of what it refers to as the “google generation” and the way young people fail to evaluate information from electronic sources. It goes on to report “that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority and children have been observed printing-off and using Internet pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them”.

5. On a similar note, an interesting post by slewfootsnoop about dubious posts to Wikipedia illustrates the importance of questioning what you read online e.g. who’s written it, why and whether its widely held as credible elsewhere before citing it as a source. (Um not sure i did this myself with this blog post so guilty as charged).

6. According to the British Cartographic Society “Internet mapping is wiping the rich geography and history of Britain off the map”³ Not sure about this one. If the British Cartographic Society were that worried about it they could easily produce a mashup using Google maps of the landmarks that have allegedly gone missing…..

7. Carol Ness from UCBerkeley writes about “Web 2.0: Opening up, or dumbing down?” and reports on a debate between two authors from opposing camps, Andrew Keen and Paul Duguid, about whether web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia and You Tube are the “scourge of American culture, laying waste to its 20th-century institutions and dumbing down society?” (Keen) or “is the Internet’s latest incarnation a cultural liberator?” (Duguid).

Interestingly Amazon’s web based reviews give Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet Is Killing Our Culture a big thumbs down compared to more favourable reviews to Duguid’s book The Social Life of Information.

8. Web design is now having an acknowledged impact in print. Roger Alton, Editor of The Independent wrote on 23rd Sept 08 about a “Bright new chapter in this newspaper’s history” and goes on to explain how “all main section pages have handy, colour-coded sing-posting to make it easier to navigate”. Nicholas Carr cites this as an example of old media having to play by new media rules. I’ve always skim read the newspaper to find what is of interest, so as far as i’m concerned these new devices simply help.

I happen to think that the Internet is a good thing and that if used correctly it can make us smarter. I still read books even if some people don’t, in fact I sit on a packed train everyday where lots of people read them. The internet doesn’t replace existing methods of research it supplements them. With search you have to think about the terms used to make sure you get what you need. And by asking the right questions about the information you are viewing - who wrote it, why, who links to it etc etc, it’s possible to find a balanced view online.

Make your own mind up!