Google Gets Richer and Makes Us "Stupid"

The announcement of Google’s earnings for the third quarter of this year is the latest in a story of great success by any standards. For 13 years, this technology company was able not only to control its sector but also to become an important part of the daily lives of people in various parts of the world.

During the third quarter, Google made a profit of $9.7 billion — a marked increase from the third quarter of 2010, when profits reached $7.2 billion. What is really remarkable is the announcement of $7.5 billion in net profit. This has made it one of the biggest companies in the world that depends on advertising as its chief source of income, and superior to most media networks in the world.

This success is based on Google’s creativity, which shattered the conventions of advertising. Now Google has entered another stage, specializing in mobile technology. In contrast to computer search engines, where Microsoft is trying to compete with Google, Google controls 100 percent of search on mobile devices with the release of Android devices and the purchase of Motorola. The latest announcement is the establishment of a market to buy applications and content to compete with Apple’s iTunes, since Google still has things to accomplish.

However, those who talk about Google’s rapid growth and profits must agree that they should keep an eye on the negative effects of the public’s adoption of Google search and other information gathering. In the past, the human mind strengthened itself by the work of searching, finding, learning and building pyramids of information; its intelligence flowed smoothly. Therefore, the mind could build its own living civilizations, experience revelations and enjoy the human experience at many different levels.

What Google did was to make it much easier (especially now that Google search is on mobile phones) for people to find out all the information they want, when they want it, more and more quickly, everyday. However, European and American scientists have noted in a wide variety of studies comparing this new generation to more mature generations the rapid change in the ability of people to assimilate information and to synthesize it in their minds, since today, doing research just means going to Google and gathering the bits of information they need to read, study and think about. All human knowledge is available at the push of a button, which has utterly changed the dynamics of thinking and the communication of knowledge between people.

Some say the studies are simply afraid of change, and that people will now have time to use the information instead of just learning it, but the studies actually do not show any reason to doubt that the capacity of the human mind is weakening; attention spans are quickly getting shorter, and it is getting difficult to use information in any deep way. Because of Google, people are not thinking and thus are not exercising the muscles of their mind.

In 2008, the venerable American magazine The Atlantic Monthly published an article entitled “Does Google Make Us Stupid?” which tried to summarize the studies that showed these effects of searching and modern information gathering. In [Nicholas Carr’s] opinion, the most important effect is the loss of concentration among people in general: Since the beginning of this sort of rapid exchange and skimming of information, the ability of the human mind to focus deeply on information has declined. Finally, he summarized the results of a number of studies and conferences, which focused on the same subject in one way or other.

Peter Norvig, the Director of Research at Google, countered Nicholas Carr, claiming that the ability to focus and the ability to scan information quickly can exist in the human mind simultaneously, and in that when they make getting information easier, they give people the opportunity to excel — doing more and doing it better.

In my opinion, given the results of these studies, there is no solution to the rising influence of search technology in our lives, but if there is a solution, it may lie in the development of an institution to strengthen people’s attention spans and their ability assimilate information and think. Also, an intensive national program of improvement to help people retain information from their years of learning. As the famous saying goes, “seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave.” (This is not the sort of thing they say at Google.)