Wikipoogle- why go anywhere else? If Wikipedia has an article regarding that topic, googling it will show it without asking you to scroll past five entries. The two entities are partners in the page-rank war. They are the power players. Google is ten years old, and Wikipedia is seven; in Internet years, this relationship has lasted quite a while. Our daily life has morphed into a break-neck-paced, visually overwhelming stream of information plugging into a person using all outlets. Our desk computers, laptops, phones, Blackberry’s, and PDAs keep us connected quickly and constantly. When something happens, whether that something is Anna Nichole Smith’s untimely death or McCain’s VP pick, the internet shows no prejudice, and it delivers the news before the story is even complete.
How does this evolution affect the ever-changing Internet surfer, who googles his or her way along the campaign? The average attention span of someone searching for something on the Internet does not allow him or her the willpower and stamina to view all the endless pages of a search result. Getting to the end of the pages on a popular topic, such as Obama, holds the same futile mystery as finding out what is on every channel when someone has the three-hundred-channel cable package. We just can’t know everything, and we couldn’t begin to try. It’s information overload. Therefore, we reluctantly trust the wisdom of Google to provide the most reliable and best sources on the first or second page. As a student, would you do a research paper using books someone else checked out of the library, sources someone else decided were the best, these few choices from walls and walls of titles. Why do we trust a search engine to do the same? The answer is because Wikipedia speaks the fast-pasted language of the time-constrained surfer who still needs to know. It has everything and links to everything it used a source. It’s quick, convenient, easy to remember, written on a below average reading level, and generally holds short entries that don’t try the attention span.
The Google generation bred the demand for a source such as Wikipedia. Nicholas Carr writes on the need to explore the way the Internet and this media is programming the users in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He cites Maryanne Wolfe’s notion that deep reading is tied to deep thinking. Deep reading is of course nonexistent and entirely unnecessary when reading, more like skimming, the information surrounded by ads, pop-ups, games, and links, blinking and glowing in competition for the viewer’s attention. The pervasive thread in his piece is that the human brain is exposed to the google power, which will spawn “hyperactive, data-stroked minds,” which will lead to a race of what Richard Foreman calls the “pancake people… spread wide and thin.”
Dawn Teo writes in her post on the Huffington Post that Americans are widely under-informed about the election. She writes to promote the idea that political activists must accept this fact and share the light, so to speak. Essentially, she supports her stance that Americans are disengaged with the web traffic map. The blogs, political columns, and You Tube serve as distractions from the main sources of valuable information. The informed must reach out to the uninformed, the ones who lean on Google and Wikipedia.
Is Google Making Us Stupid? Well, no, it’s making us adapt to an instant information-charged life. And that doesn’t necessarily make us smarter.
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