Alan Jacobs


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I don’t subscribe to the ‘Google is making us dumber’ position. I think Google is allowing us to be differently smart. I also refuse to bracket off my students as some exotic tribe that behaves and reacts differently than I do or my mother does. We are all in this crazy environment together. The challenges we share are much more important and interesting than the differences we might demonstrate across age groups. So yeah, Google is my primary research tool. It’s also my mother’s. Collectively, our dependence on Google is not a problem because it allegedly weakens our faculties. It’s a problem because Google bakes biases into its algorithms. And we fail to recognize that fact. Most of the time, we can’t even discern what they are. Most of the recent changes in Google’s search algorithms make Google much better for shopping and much worse for learning. That could make us collectively dumber, but not individually. That’s why we need a fresh approach to how we manage our information ecosystem. The same service cannot serve wisdom and wealth equally well.