Google's Impact on Human Cognition

Response to: “In Google We Trust”

Andrea Schlesinger’s, “In Google We Trust” a chapter in her book The Death of Why? The issue is that the internet has changed people and that it may not be a good thing. Google has changed the way that people think greatly, especially in our ability to analyze, understand and know the source of the information we receive from google.

I agree with Schlesinger when she suggests that “we have come to believe that wisdom is accessible somewhere on a web page, if only we find the right one” (58). I feel that we have been taught that the answer to everything is on the internet and all we have to do is type a question into a search box press enter and the answer shall magically appear. However there isn’t always

an answer, not every question has already been answered, and yet no one seems to take the time to go out to figure out their own answers, and to explore for themselves rather than simply looking it up on the internet. It’s like looking up how to do brain surgery rather than going out and getting a degree and actually hands on learn to be a brain surgeon.
Schlesinger uses a quote from Marcel Proust to show that “we do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we see the world”(58).

I can relate to this because every time that I have been asked to do research for a paper, the first thing I turn to is the internet. I don’t think that I have ever once gone out to find or discover my own information. The closest I have ever gotten to actually going out to find information was once in my cols class when we were all assigned a college resource to go to and ask someone working there what they are “all about”. I love that Schlesinger is concerned about this issue, I am too, and this worries me because one day my generation will be running the whole world and if we believe the answer to everything is on the internet what happens when we come across a question that the internet can’t answer? Will we leave it unanswered and simply forget about it or will we be able to go out and find the answers for ourselves. Kind of like Schlesinger askes “will we grow accustomed to only asking questions that we know we can answer by using out cell

phones?”(59).
Another point Schlesinger brings up through an anecdote is from a librarian Emily Drabinski, about a student who asks for help researching Courtesan for a paper: “at one point the two were looking at a book on the screen, with the keyword courtesan highlighted in yellow as book search does, when the student asked, ‘how do I know this is about what I need it to be about’ Drabinski asked, ‘what do you mean’, ‘well I see my words highlighted, but does that mean this is relevant?’ […] ‘She had to read it and think about it. She didn’t seem to know, and I think that that’s internet related’ ” (65-66). This resonates with me because it really made me feel for her and her concern for students and how students use their resources just because the keywords are highlighted doesn’t mean that it is going to be relevant to what you are looking for. To me it’s like asking what the factors of 144 are and expecting only one right answer when there are clearly multiple answers and it would need more information than that in order for someone to come up with the one right answer they are looking for.
For instance when Schlesinger brings up the way students “search for information as ‘horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature. Students demonstrate little concentration, little attempt to actually engage with content.’ “(63). I have been in a similar situation once when trying to do research for a paper, I couldn’t seem to find anything I thought was relevant because I wasn’t reading carefully enough. All of my key terms seemed to be used in the wrong context when I asked my teacher for help he pointed out to me that everything was actually in the context I wanted it to be, I just didn’t read it carefully enough to understand what it was really saying. I wanted to mention this because I think that students inability to read into something to see if its relevant is a direct result of bouncing from page to page to quickly they see the keywords they simply print that off and move on without ever actually analyzing because they assume that if there key terms are is must be what they are looking for.
I can academically connect to Schlesinger when she brings up that students don’t question who/where their information is coming from. She states that “it’s not that they couldn’t figure whether the source was credible if they wanted to; it’s that they didn’t think to question the legitimacy and accuracy of the information they got through their search engines.”(69). I can connect to this because last year (my senior year) in my English class before our final paper we had a discussion about this issue, everyone seemed to know that you shouldn’t use Wikipedia to get any answers off the internet, but not many of us knew that most of the sites that Google will give you are just like Wikipedia, and when he asked that no one use Google at all to do our research at first I was kind of upset about it, but then he introduced us to Academic data bases. I loved using our academic data bases because you can specify more of your search by putting what you are looking for and what you aren’t looking for along with what kind of site you would like the information to come from (.Edu, .Gov, ECT.) which helps you know you are getting information from a more “credible” source. I think that not learning how to use academic data bases earlier rather than in my senior year really sucked for me because had I learned it earlier I would have been able to use them for much more than one paper in all of my 18 years.
Not only that but I didn’t always question my sources, and it makes me wonder how many papers I had written before then that could have been really funny for my English teacher to read if I used a source that didn’t know what they were talking about, or was all together just not “credible” or I didn’t understand what the person was saying and wrote a bunch of non-sense. I also learned that anyone can put an answer on any one of these sites, including myself, which means that what you get from these sites might not be the right answer or even an answer at all for instance I could write that the holocaust never happened on a page about kwanza, or I could even write that gay marriage is wrong on a page about tortoises, but what is the most upsetting part is that a seventh grader could open the page about tortoises and print it off to use it without even knowing that it says gay marriage is wrong somewhere on the page, simply because they didn’t take the time to read it carefully enough to question the source. This is another reason why it’s important to fully analyze, understand, and know what the source of what you are reading.
So has google changed us for better or for worse, will the internet expand our abilities or stop them in their tracks, will the negative effects of the internet be reversed by the positive. Will we be able to stop the internet from changing everything about the way we understand, analyze and know the sources of our information?