Research and Describe Effects of Google to the Society (Essay Sample)

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The Google Effect
Founded in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, google has grown to occupy an important place in modern day researches. Google is most popular for the search services it provides. From physical directions to a place, methods to solving a problem to history of a person or event, anything just name it, google always has the answer. This form of technology has proved to be effective in speeding up researches and finding out about specific things compared to reading large volumes of book or asking someone. However, the popular search engine has its own fair share of negative effects on perpetual users which gives rise to the question “Is technology making us stupid?”
Genevieve Roberts investigates the theory ‘Google Effect’ CITATION Rob16 \l 2057 (Roberts) which states that people have outsourced their memories knowing that answers they seek are just a click away. This is a working theory considering the level of dependence that people have on the search engine. When seeking answers, people rarely work their minds to recall or come up with new ideas for their solutions, instead they take the easiest option and just google it. We do not see the need to strain our minds by keeping so much information there because we are sure that there are other ways to recover information. In CITATION Rob16 \l 2057 (Roberts), a study shows that most people (90%) nowadays suffer from a condition called Digital Amnesia. This condition is characterised by not remembering the simplest and important things in our everyday life like the cell phone numbers of our loved ones. We have instead transferred this memory responsibility to modern technology: smartphones and cloud.
Dr Maria Wimber who is a lecturer at the University of Birmingham’s School of Psychology also worked on the Digital Amnesia research. According to her, we are so comfortable not recalling things that we ought to remember because we are sure that google knows everything. We task our minds with recalling exactly where to get the information in question but we have totally no idea of what the information is about.
The deteriorating levels of memory can well be displayed by photographs. A study done by Fairfield University in 2003 found that when we take photos, we tend to lose our memory of the contents of the photo. Again, by trusting our smartphones to capture life’s moments and events, we tend not to task our brain with remembering them. In this way, we transfer the work that our minds are supposed to do to technology.
The fact that we tend to use our memory less each day does not augur well for our knowledge generation CITATION Nic10 \l 2057 (Carr). The mind is not compact, it expands according to the quantity of information that we feed it. The more you store in your mind, the more information you have to work on during ...