Google Make Us Stupid? Noted

¶ … Google make us Stupid? Noted author and former editor of the Harvard Business Review Nicholas Carr wrote a provocative article in the July 2008 edition of the Atlantic Monthly titled Is Google Making Us Stupid? The article slammed Google's instant response to questions and queries and the behavior it promotes of searching only for snippets or small segments of information instead of delving deep into a subject.

In his article, he laments that he rarely has the attention span to read longer analyses and studies, and has found himself moving quickly between rapid responses over Google. There have been many articles and empirical studies since done to refute his claim and one of the better compilations of expert responses is from the Pew Research Center titled "Does Google Make Us Stupid?"(Anderson, Lee, et.al.). In this article published by Pew, thought leaders who specialize in Internet and search technologies make many excellent points.

The intent of this argumentative essay is to refute Nicholas Carr's contention that Google is dumbing us down, showing it instead to be a catalyst of economic growth through enriching people and organizations with knowledge. Why Carr is Wrong Today the global economy is fueled not by capital investment and the massive build-up of production centers, it is fueled by knowledge.

The only industries growing as of 2010 have at their core the ability to quickly generate, interpret, classify and then use knowledge to better serve customers and deliver greater value over time. Knowledge, not capital investment, is what is going to continue global economic growth. To debate this point is to ignore the transition of intensive manufacturing industries from mass production operations to being entirely customer-driven in scope, embracing mass customization and personalization of products.

This transition away from brute-force productivity to mass customization is one of thousands of examples of how knowledge, fueled by the Internet, is making it possible for entire value chains of industries to stay in business. Google is the catalyst of knowledge sharing in these industries struggling to survive. Without Google, the business processes of mass customization would not have permeated industries that need an injection of innovation to survive.

An extreme example but powerful one, this revolution in the most asset-intensive industries globally puts into hard facts what Google does very well, and that is accelerate knowledge transfer. Nicholas Carr's analysis of Google dumbing us down also completely misses the point of how people learn over the long-term. The three core values of autonomy, mastery and purpose must be present for anyone to be motivated to learn and change based on knowledge.

Google gives anyone the opportunity to autonomously search for information, master it by studying the subjects of interest, and find purpose in the study by aligning the knowledge to their.