Internet rend-il stupide ? (radio) Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Magazine. Illustration by Guy Billout "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” I can feel it, too. I think I know what’s going on. For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
I’m not the only one. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. Also see: Where does it end?
Exodus. « The iPad Luddites | Main | The law of situational Ludditism » April 08, 2010 Has it begun? James Sturm, the cartoonist, can't take it anymore, "it" being the Internet: Over the last several years, the Internet has evolved from being a distraction to something that feels more sinister. He's not quite ready to divorce the web. I know there's no going back to the pre-Internet days, but I just want to move forward a little more slowly. Disconnection is the new counterculture. UPDATE: There's an amusing exchange in the comments to Sturm's article at Slate: > Disconnection is the new counterculture. Pretty much. When Internet access was a restricted part of intellectual jobs, being connected was a high-status action.
There's nothing new under the, err, sun. Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at April 9, 2010 12:30 AM Your getting old. ;) I don´t hear my kids complaining for them Internet is just life. Posted by: Mats Lindholm at April 9, 2010 02:39 AM "Disconnection is the new counterculture. " Er. Internet et Google vont-ils finir par nous abrutir ? Voici la traduction d’un article assez passionnant qui a connu un bel impact dans la sphère anglophone au moment de sa mise en ligne cet été.
Son titre choc Is Google Making Us Stupid ? Est un peu trompeur car il s’agit bien moins de charger l’emblématique Google que de s’interroger sur les transformations profondes induites par internet et les nouvelles technologies, transformations qui peuvent aller jusqu’à modifier nos perceptions, nos modes de pensée, voire même notre cerveau. Prenons le Framablog par exemple. Il possède, merci pour lui, d’assez bonnes statistiques d’audience globales, mais lorsque l’on se penche sur la moyenne du temps passé par page, c’est la grosse déprime car cela ne dépasse que trop rarement les deux minutes, intervalle qui ne vous permet généralement pas d’y parcourir les articles du début à la fin. En décidant d’en achever la lecture bien avant la conclusion, peut-on affirmer que plus de la moitié des visiteurs ne les trouvent pas intéressants ? Author Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains | M.
During the winter of 2007, a UCLA professor of psychiatry named Gary Small recruited six volunteers—three experienced Web surfers and three novices—for a study on brain activity. He gave each a pair of goggles onto which Web pages could be projected. Then he slid his subjects, one by one, into the cylinder of a whole-brain magnetic resonance imager and told them to start searching the Internet.
As they used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics—the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car—the MRI scanned their brains for areas of high activation, indicated by increases in blood flow. The two groups showed marked differences. The most remarkable result of the experiment emerged when Small repeated the tests six days later.
When first publicized, the findings were greeted with cheers. What kind of brain is the Web giving us? By the end of the decade, the enthusiasm was turning to skepticism. Go Back to Top. The iPad Luddites. Is it possible for a Geek God to also be a Luddite? That was the question that popped into my head as I read Cory Doctorow’s impassioned anti-iPad diatribe at Boing Boing. The device that Apple calls “magical” and “revolutionary” is, to Doctorow, a counterrevolutionary contraption conjured up through the black magic of the wizards at One Infinite Loop.
The locked-down, self-contained design of the iPad – nary a USB port in sight, and don’t even think about loading an app that hasn’t been blessed by Apple – manifests “a palpable contempt for the owner,” writes Doctorow. You can’t fiddle with the dang thing: The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. Doctorow is not the only Geek God who’s uncomfortable with Apple’s transformation of the good ole hacktastic PC into a sleek, slick, sterile appliance. And Ned would have been right. Samedi-sciences (5): Internet et Google nous rendent-ils stupides? La scène se déroule à la rédaction de Mediapart : pour étayer un point de vue sur la démocratie, un journaliste cite une phrase de Thomas Jefferson selon laquelle il vaut mieux une presse sans gouvernement qu'un gouvernement sans presse. Mais notre rédacteur ne se souvient pas de la citation exacte.
Un autre membre de la rédaction affirme que Jefferson a voulu dire le contraire. Le premier, embarrassé, ne sait à quel américaniste se vouer. Une consultation sur Internet apporte la réponse en trois clics : Thomas Jefferson a bel et bien placé la liberté de la presse au premier rang des exigences démocratiques. Cher lecteur, si vous ne savez pas qui est Edward Carrington, cliquez ici. Et si souhaitez lire la citation intégrale en anglais, cliquez ici. Internet et ses moteurs de recherche sont des outils extrêmement puissants qui ont raccourci, au moins en apparence, la distance entre un docteur en histoire et un citoyen de base. Betsy Sparrow a fait subir plusieurs tests à des étudiants. Google's Effects on Memory