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What did you used to know and have committed to memory before technology created the Google Method of knowledge acquisition? Phone numbers? Directions to places? Recipes? Instructions for jump starting a car or changing a tire?
I once read an interesting little doggerel poem that described a “circular truth” in an old joke book that had been published in the mid-1960s, which I picked up at the thrift store for a quarter decades later. The adage went like this:
The more you study, the more you learn.
The more you learn, the more you know.
The more you know, the more you forget.
The more you forget, the less you know.
Why study?
The final question in the poem made great sense to me as a child and made me laugh and wonder why we had to cram so much knowledge into our heads in school. If I was going to end up forgetting so much of it anyway, asking my parents why we had to memorize so much in the first place seemed like a reasonable response.
Is There Any Real Need to Learn Anything Today?
During the past two-and-a-half decades, the arrival and entrenchment of desktop, laptop, notebook, and surface computers have created a whole new environment for knowledge storage and knowledge acquisition. The twin trends of “fast food” and “having it your way” have gone from describing the access routes to tangible, edible consumables all the way to describing how intangible knowledge and data is acquired and digested.
Humans love the novel and the new – the desire and appetite for the latest “toy” remains present for the majority of the human race, if advertisements and sales figures can be believed. Like fad diets or exercise crazes, technology trends sweep across nations as we all want to be in on the hot new thing. When we first began texting or IM’ing, we were growing into a new way of communicating that replaced (or extended) telephone communications.
Today, everyone is Googling everything! There are fun screen shots of older adults and their google experiences reported by their grandkids. There are humorous tricks that can be summoned up by googling specific words. However, it seems that the easiest way to answer any tough question or satisfy a passing curiosity is through the online search of your choosing – Googling it, Binging it, whatever.
Does Google = The Collective Consciousness?
Psychologists write about collective unconsciousness, which describes the location of shared instincts or universal symbols that understood across humans from around the globe. Perhaps the Internet is now taking on a parallel role as the shared consciousness of humans? Being able to immediately translate any page, access information, statistics, instructions, mathematical formulas, personal data of persons you don’t even know, ancestry information that was never passed down directly between generations, literature, music, and on and on, does provide something of a shared awareness of the external world.
Basically, any fact or figure you want to know or should have remembered is now easily accessible through a technological “training brain,” the World Wide Web.
Does Any Harm Come from Googling It?
Unfortunately, research has turned up some not-so-comforting thoughts about our reliance on the internet (Sparrow, Liu, & Wegner, 2011). The more we rely on the “training brain” to provide us with memory-joggers and or access data that we should have stored, the less likely we are to be able to recall or maintain pieces of information that we ought to be able to manage. Difficult questions lead us to turn first to a computer, rather than our memory or own problem-solving abilities, and if we think the answer might be found easier online than within, then it’s a sure bet that our recall is going to be compromised just by knowing that the information is available in the “collective consciousness” of the web.
Returning to the doggerel poem shared above, new ways of “knowing” sadly give a whole new meaning to the final question, “Why study?” If we know we have access to a computer that is faster, quicker, and more reliable than our own minds, the point of taking time to learn something new has already been compromised and we have already sabotaged our own abilities to actually “learn” and “digest” new information for the long haul. Self-efficacy in your learning prowess takes a beating when you have an “easy out” and overreliance on external assistance.
Brains are just like muscles – you don’t use’em, you lose’em.
References
Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google effects on memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. Science, 333(6043), 776-778.
