Is the internet making us stupid? (From Halesowen News)

Is the internet making us stupid?

11:37am Thursday 14th October 2010 in Business Blogs By Louise Hewett

As business people, most of us have come to depend in the internet as a source of information and interaction. It gives us a vast resource at our fingertips right there whenever we want it.

Since time began, every new technology has been greeted with initial alarm and distain but according to research in the case of the internet – they might be right.

Apparently there is a danger that browsing the web is dumbing us down. ‘Flicking’ behavior with constant distraction and interruptions is threatening to turn us into scattered superficial thinkers. Nicholas Carr’s new book ‘The Shallows, how the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember’ was inspired by his realisation that he was losing his own capability for concentration and contemplation. He explains “Even when I was away from the computer, my mind seemed hungry for constant stimulation, for quick hits of information. I felt perpetually distracted”.

AS we lurch from site to site, constantly craving the pleasure of new information our brains can’t forge the strong connections that give us depth to our thinking. In one experiment at a US University, half the class of students were allowed to use internet connected laptops during a lecture and the other had to keep their computers shut. Those browsing the web performed much worse on a subsequent test on the content of the lecture.

In a recent experiment at Stanford University, researchers gave various cognitive tests to 49 people who do a lot of media multi-tasking and 52 people who multi-task much less frequently. The heavy multi-taskers performed poorly on all the tests – they were more easily distracted/had less control over their attention were much less able to distinguish important information from trivia.

It is impossible to imagine life without the World Wide Web – other studies have contradicted Carr’s findings, claiming that we in fact exercise the mental muscle that makes us smarter when we use the internet. Let’s face it – we can’t function without it but can we be more disciplined about the way we use it?

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