Inter-Stupid
Tyler Smith
McDonald
May 17, 2013 Throughout time, Man has come up with amazing inventions, like the light bulb. Even just the invention or idea of harnessing electricity to power of appliances in our everyday lives comes to astonish anyone that tries to grasp the concept. But nowadays, electronics like cell phones, television, and Google are allowing the human race to not think to be independent thinkers. These electronics, used improperly, can dumb people down to near 1300’s knowledge. Google is an American multinational corporation specializing in internet related products and services. Google was founded in 1998, but went public in 2004, by Larry Page. The initial idea for Google was to create algorithms for keyword internet searches across trillions upon trillions of websites. These algorithms would take the websites from The Index and order them by most used/popular. As the most relevant page of a website shows up, that had to be filtered through 200 factors to make it to the top of your search results. So, essentially Google seems like it’s a good, but it’s not. If making people dumb was a crime, Google would be an accessory to that crime, and the internet was the criminal. In everybody’s mind, Google is a great thing to use when you are “drawing a blank,” but not for constant searches of cats being cute or “failing.” Google is enabling the people of today to not think for themselves. Instead of trying to think of “that actor that played in that one movie with Johnny Depp in 2008” and possibly waiting a week later to finally remember Pirates of the Caribbean: on Stranger’s Tides. Now it will only take about a minute to look it up on a smartphone. As Google allows the searches of “Spark Notes” (summarized books/chapters of a book), the Internet is the true culprit here. Allowing true and false information seep into the brains of Americans causes unnecessary arguments, fights, and maybe even an upcoming nuclear war against North Korea. People aren’t reading books as much as they used to before the Internet came around. Now you can just read the book for free by downloading a bootlegged e-book. Even when this happens, the person can’t be fully sure if it’s even the real book or not, unless you bought an authorized e-book from Amazon or iTunes. Nowadays, more and more people are using Google more than actually need to. This is allowing them to not actually use their brain power to sift through the piles and piles of the information the brain has that no one really thinks it has. This is dumbing Americans (and even Earthans) down, enabling them to use less than 4% of Brain power. One concept that has been brought to light back in the 1970 novel Future Shock by Alvin Toffler is “Information Overload.” It refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making a decision that can be caused by the presence of too much information. “Information Overload occurs when the amount of input to a system exceeds its processing capacity. Decision Makers have fairly limited cognitive processing capacity. Consequently, when information overload occurs, it is likely that a reduction in decision quality will occur.” (Bertram Gross, 1964, The Managing of Organizations.) This idea might seem contradictive to the previous one I just made, but it won’t. The idea of Information overload would actually still dumb people down. Think of the Brain as a computer, if you use too much RAM (random access memory) than the processing will be as slow as the first Macintosh computer. But the simpler things are, less RAM in the brain is used and the more processing power the person has. So, with so much information needing to be memorized nowadays, the dumber people will get. “6 out of 10 people claim that they suffer Infobesity (information overload), stating that they need to write these numbers down in order to remember.” (Ben Quinn, Telegram.) The Cause of Infobesity is the increasing rate of new