#the google effect

Hey everyone, I wrote an article encapsulating some of my thoughts about memory, endings, and information in the digital age.

Topics include:

Mario Maker 1

Magnus Hirschfeld

LiveJournal

The Ace Community

Goncharov

And here's a little snippet from the introduction

Greetings followers,

I have been wanting to write my opinions on this topic for some time now. I started the writing some time ago, but it was deleted on my flash drive that housed all of my entries from the last 2 years. Nonetheless, I pray my passion and a Word be spoken through me to you, the reader, to deliver the message intended.

"Google it, Google Me, Just use Google, I found it on Google" These phrases are now common in our jargon or vernacular if you will. I mean in the past we've had Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, and even 'Bing' now. However, just about anyone would agree that 'google' has integrated its need into our framework of society. Since the name was first selected in 1997, it has grown exponentially beyond what anyone would have ever expected.

What was life like before Google. When the internet was still relatively new. AOL and Yahoo ruled the internet; not to mention they were the 'bees knees' of things to do while you surfed. At this time, we were very limited to what we would look up on the internet. During this time there were more people posting the information, rather than there was people looking for it. The greatest minds, poets, authors, and educators saw the internet as a way of getting their information out to the public in an efficient, easily accessible, and fast way. Volumes of information began to flood the internet. Not knowing that this great technology was going to eventually cause a generation to become dependent on it's usefulness.

Before Google our main source of information (even though other search engines existed) was people. We developed relationships with others that were 'wired-in' to life and the things which most interested us. If we were unable to get to the person, we would most likely grab a book or find a sum total of the information provided by that person to satisfy our intellectual curiosity.OR we would tickle our own brains to rain out ideas and thoughts that were original in nature and build upon them with intellectual conversation.

NOW, we have Google. What a great company and invention it is. E-mail, phones, social networking, maps, goggles, YouTube, Ad-Sense,etc. Google has even became a noun and verb in the English language! Now we can go to Google for practically anything we need to know, at any moment that we need to know it. Students are using Google at an alarming rate! I overheard two students discussing the phenomenon we know as Google by saying, "If it wasn't for Google I wouldn't have made it through College."

College! The Post-Secondary education that you pay for somebody to teach you specialized skills. Skills that should be developed within by the assistance and only assistance of those who has mastered the material. Have we as a society lost our ability to think. Are we so reliant on the fact that we know Google is there, and there are those that have provided all the information that we need to know there for us to access it. Ask yourself, why should I as a High School student read "To Kill a Mockingbird" if I can find the book, summaries, videos, analysis, and written papers on it from the internet. Others have already done this, so why take my brain through 'unnecessary' struggle to learn what will always be available with a few keystrokes, or even a voice to text application. 

I think we are on the brink of something dangerous if we do not find a way to keep the informants > information.  Through Google and others sites a like the idea of everyone being 'one' is more like a reality. Everyone can go to the same places, at any time, to get the same information. We are all globally linked through video, web, and various chat capabilities with just the click of a button or tap of a mouse. Do not let these huge leaps in technology prevent you from exercising the one muscle that one can not feel or touch, your brain. Take the time develop your own character, and develop your own intellect. Depend less on technology and the access of what is not your own.

How often do you "Google It" instead of trying to remember a fact?

Last week I read an article that explains how our memories and neural pathways have adapted to the ubiquity of the internet. Essentially, our brains have stopped remembering the information itself, and we are only remembering where to find it.

The article, which appeared in Time Magazine's (equally fascinating) 10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life feature, is part of a larger look at social change.

Betsy Sparrow, assistant professor of psychology at Columbia University who co-authored a study on the subject said

When people expect to have information available to them later, they don't remember it as well.

This is a pattern that I have noticed myself adhering to in the last couple of years and it has really accelerated in the last few months. I've lost count of the number of times I've caught myself saying "I read/watched/heard something about that recently..." only to find that I can't actually remember the point I'm supposed to be making.

So should we be worried? A friend of mine - a PhD candidate in a neuroscience faculty - certainly seemed to think so and was always a staunch advocate of mind over Google. She claimed that the easy access to information was eroding our neural pathways and making us lazy.

The author of the study would tend to disagree with that and argues instead that this is just another step in the brain's adaptation to the external environment.

In fact, Sparrow says the things that we are storing externally are 

Things that we don't need to use in our day-to-day lives and things that we aren't experts in.

Apparently, this phenomenon is called Transactive memory and it is something that humans have used for aeons. Transactive memory is the reason that people tend to only store the information that they consider necessary, whilst disregarding more 'useless' facts.

I realised that we humans do this with far more than just our memories. On a recent holiday I noticed that my friend (hopeless with directions), and I (hopeless with timekeeping) had outsourced these tasks to one another. Along as I kept an eye on where we were going and she kept an eye on the time, our system worked perfectly.