Suppose a friend on social media mentions a film or a philosophical concept that I am only vaguely aware of, I can quickly Google it and see what exactly they are talking about. Sometimes if I'm in a quandary as to the specific definition of a term and how it can be used in a sentence, I would choose to Google it before I use it. So I thought that the internet was making me smarter. Research suggests that this may not be so – there is evidence to suggest that the internet could be making us lazy, stupid and less empathetic.
Some years back, researchers spoke about something called the Google Effect – also known as digital amnesia. They found that people are less likely to try and learn or remember things that they know they can access easily online. The feeling is that we don’t need to make that effort when information is literally at our fingertips. The result is that Google makes us think we are smarter than we actually are and we tend to develop an exaggerated sense of our own memory. More recently, a similar study found that people who rely heavily on Google tend to overestimate the strength of their own memory.
There are other ways in which the internet makes us less, not more smart. Our attention span is shorter and we are more prone to distractions than ever before. With the ready availability of so much information and entertaining content available to us constantly, it is difficult to choose what to consume and what not to. In the event, we are constantly skimming, making snap judgements about all that we come across on the net. This negatively impacts our ability to concentrate, comprehension skills and our ability to retain information, say researchers.
Research conducted in 2018 in Norway found that IQ scores have been declining for the past few decades. Earlier there was something called the Flynn Effect that saw a steady rise in IQ of the population because of better nutrition and education access. However, with the rise of technology over the past few decades, we have now actually seen a drop of 7 IQ points because ‘of environmental causes such as the internet’.
Earlier accessing information meant going to a library or other information resource physically searching for information, taking notes etc. Now we speak into our phones. We no longer pay attention to road directions – because Google Maps does the needful. Alexa plays music for us, switches on the light and AC/heating and there is a robot vacuum that cleans our homes while we sleep. There is less physical and mental effort that we expend. As some experts put it, we are using the internet as an external hard drive and storing less information in our brains.
We have also become less empathetic. There are videos of violence, people playing pranks, others being scared out of their wits everywhere. CCTV footage shows us car crashes, fights, stabbings and more. Kids play the most horrifyingly violent video games. The impact is that people have become used to seeing the pain and misfortune of others. It no longer impacts and it no longer elicits an empathetic reaction.
But maybe it isn't all bad. While the constantly connected generation may be less smart, the internet also still provides more equal information access. Up to date information is more readily available to many more people than ever before – as such the poor and marginalised have a better chance to improve their lot. People with disabilities and health issues have better and wider access to support and social groups on the internet than they ever would otherwise.
Quite simply we are looking for and getting more information than ever before. Where earlier we simply didn’t have the means, we now can look up news from several sources, look up new words, historical facts, philosophical theories, psychological explanations and more. We have access to accurate and authentic information, so even if that uncle is WhatsApping us fake news/propaganda, we have the power to debunk it in a matter of moments. All said and done, this is a note to self: it may not be a bad idea to pick up a book and read it once in a while.
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