Google is making us more dumberest?

I don’t want to catch any of you guys off guard so I’ll just let you know ahead of time, this is gonna be a long one so please bear with me.

Well I must admit there were a lot of interesting and true things stated in this article. I couldn’t exactly find where in the article, but it said something along the lines of the internet giving us a shorter attention span. I unfortunately have to agree with this. In the course of reading the article I drove to Fresno AM Track, watched TV, ate dinner, took a nap, made some online purchases, and watched half a dozen YouTube videos.

I constantly found myself wanting to do something anything else, than read the article then and there. But for the last half of the article I forced myself to sit there and read the whole thing through, which I successfully accomplished I might add. I felt a little like Carr when he said “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” What does that say about people using the internet more frequently? I think it says that we no longer legitimately try to sit there and read something, a book for example, the whole way through and have the same deep thoughts and reflections that we used to have. The thoughts in solitude that added to the glory of books and all that was in them. We now just surf the net looking for the most entertaining thing to read/do and then move on to the next topic rapidly. We allow ourselves to be distracted and look for that thing that captures our attention most and act upon that.

For example I, while reading the article, obviously got distracted and went on random searches. I wanted to search most visited websites on Google but before I could start the word “visited” it showed an alternate list of things I might be “interested in.” And I’ll be damned, I was. I saw most expensive cars and got curious and clicked that and searched that for a little bit then went on over to YouTube and see some of these cars in video. While on YouTube I was distracted with another thought and this time it was Parkour (also known as free running). While I watched some of those videos I realized what was happening to me and got frightened. I got distracted by Parkour while I was checking out nice cars when I was supposed to be checking out most visited websites while I was supposed to be reading the article. I got distracted while being distracted while being distracted essentially. And I wondered what am I doing? Why can’t I just do what I initially set out to do?

The answer to this was because of the availability of the sources on the internet. Google allowed me to search whatever sporadically came to my mind and YouTube let me actually see that stuff. Maybe that’s why it sometimes takes me so long to get work done on the computer. I feel like my mind is being hijacked by the internet. Sounds kinda weird but I really think that’s what happened.

Google is essentially trying to do this as Sergey Brin and Larry Page “speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains.” As Page said in a speech of his “‘The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter’”. Just as with the invention of the clock “in deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock”, is Google that new invention that is slowly going to creep up unbeknownst to us and try to control the very way we think and function? In his interview with Newsweek Brin said “‘Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.’”

How would we be better off with an artificial brain? How? Granted we would know all the facts to know about life but that would be it: facts. What about the very things that makes us human; thoughts and opinions? What about those things? Would they just disappear? I don’t know my brain was just rattled by that comment made by one of the FOUNDERS of Google and I’m still reeling a bit. But that’s about all I have to got say right now and follow the link below if you wanna check out one of the videos I “discovered.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB4uzs_C8dU&feature=related

Oh and sorry for not relating any of this to Cat’s Cradle, I’m sure there are lots of connections between the two though.

R.I.P.: Postmodernism—you served us well.

Could it be true? Could postmodernism really be dead, gone, buried, and irrelevant? According to Dr. Alan Kirby, it has been. “Postmodernism—whatever it is—is an attempt to make sense of what is going on now—and we can see the present clearly only in retrospect” (Powell 17). Retrospect by definition is the “contemplation of the past; a survey of past time, events, etc” (Dictionary.com).

That seems a bit ironic doesn’t it? That what was happening 40 or 50 years ago would be able to tell us what is happening today. How could people back then possibly have imagined the things we do today? If we had a chat with someone from the past I highly doubt that they could have predicted us having cell phones with internet capabilities so that we can update our facebook status. That just seems absurd to me. Looking at the past to see what is going on today would be like trying to drive on the freeway with your head turned around and looking at the cars behind you. The reason why we don’t do that is because we’ll crash!

Maybe that’s why Dr. Alan Kirby thinks that postmodernism is dead and gone. Because in an ever-evolving world we can’t let the past hinder or dictate what we want to do or where we want to go.

Dr. Alan Kirby says that “In postmodernism, one read, watched, listened, as before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads” (The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond). In postmodernism, things happened to us; we watched and listened. In pseudo-modernism we are the ones doing the doing; downloading, clicking, phoning, etc. We no longer live vicariously through the world around us, the world lives vicariously through us. That seems like a narcissistic and egotistic thing to say, but think about it. All those call in shows where we cast our votes wouldn’t have a fraction of the success they have if no one called in. Shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation and movies like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity have the success they do not only because they are entertaining, but because they actively engage the audience. They make us feel as if we are right there crapping our pants or right there listening to one of Michael Scott’s lectures. The line between spectator and participator seemingly disappear.

When surfing the web or watching TV, we leave an inerasable footprint of the things we’ve clicked the channels we’ve visited. To Dr. Kirby “This is a far more intense engagement with the cultural process than anything literature can offer, and gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with the cultural product.” And to some extent I must agree with this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCdpdK8lbUQ