Essay on Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Currently, there are not many people left who don’t know what Google is. Google started as a search engine for people to make searching easy. It was used for various things such as finding definitions, looking up certain topics, and searching images. Now, Google has considered one of the most powerful tools for people using the internet. “When in doubt just Google it” is one of the most commonly used phrases today. While it makes our life easier, I think it also makes us very lazy, more than that it makes us stupid.
There are many people who believe in this point. ‘In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fussiness of contemplation (Nicholas Carr 2008). Uncertainty is not initial for intuition but a germ to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive” (Nicholas p.324). Google is in fact directly or indirectly trying to make us lazy, unproductive, and stupid even if it is not deliberate. Human beings are the most intelligent and creative creature, so we should not let our creativity and intelligence to be destroyed with excessive use of google.
To be honest, Google is an exceptional invention. The time before Google was difficult because people used to buy expensive encyclopedias and many other books or spent time in libraries even to get simple information. And on top of that Google does saves a lot of time, energy, and importantly money. In 1972 scientist Hewlett-Packard developed an advanced calculator which is called Hp-35. Professors were scared that engineering students would use those calculators just as a prop, that they would forget the penciled calculation or a slide rule. So some engineers were excluded from using Hp-35. The HP-35 hardly hurt engineering skills. Instead, in the last 36 years, those engineers have brought us iPods, cell phones, high-definition TV, and, yes, Google, and Twitter. It freed engineers from wasting time on mundane tasks so they could spend more time creating (Damon Darlin, 2008 para. 2).
In his article, Darlin says that technology has been a time saver to a lot of people by giving a calculator, a basic device used by everyone. What is wrong is that people are starting to be so dependent on technology that they forgot that it, in this case, Google is there for them to save time on mundane tasks, not to depend on it entirely. This is why people now just can’t live without it. In each and every step of a simple task, people are using Google’s help, even in those times when they can solve the problem by themselves.
