The Google Effect, Part 2

I wrote Part 1 of this post after our class discussion a few weeks ago on "push" and "pull" media and how people are remembering less information because they know they can find pretty much anything online. After writing the first part, I went to Google and typed in "why memorize facts when information is so easily available on the Internet." The results? About 34,000,000 of them. Thus the second part of the post (and a new title for the first part) was born.

Not surprisingly, there were multiple points of view on the idea of people's inability or unwillingness to memorize facts they can find online. Headlines ranged from "Piece of mind: Is the Internet replacing our ability to remember?" to "How the Internet is making us stupid" to "The Internet is changing our brains — but so what?" (Yikes.) There even is a term for it (hence the blog post title) — the Google effect, coined by three researchers who conducted a 2011 study at Columbia and Harvard universities that found people are less likely to remember certain facts when they think they can find them using a computer.

I hate to sound like a curmudgeon, but I don't think this bodes well for us as humans. I fear it will curtail our innate curiosity — something that journalists and other communicators need in spades. In one of the 34,000,000 results was a quote from Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the script for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey:

Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.

I also wanted to share the infographic below that I saw on Edudemic.com.

Merriam-Webster now lists "google" as a verb, so there's probably no going back. I just hope Google with a capital G is a benevolent emperor....