The internet doesn’t make us any smarter

For years we have all been at risk of losing our memories, or, at the very least, of losing our ability to retain information. In fact, we are at increased risk of retaining the wrong information.

I think it all started when the very first calculator came on to the market in the 1970s. As fascinating as this new handheld technology was, the more people used them the less they were able to perform the simplest of mental arithmetic.

Even something as simple as adding to two digit numbers became impossible and people reached for their calculators. But one thing is for certain, no one who uses a calculator to do their sums for them thought they were geniuses at adding up.

So my question is, who are these individuals who think they’re smart just because they find answers to questions by Googling them?

The internet is a fantastic research tool but it’s nowhere close to opening an actual textbook. Textbooks used in schools and universities are not written by just anybody.

If you thought publishing your imaginary novel was tough because it was impossible to get it past the editor’s desk then think how much tougher it must be to publish a textbook on Engineering, physics, astronomy, mathematics or English, among numerous other technical subjects?

The authors of such textbooks know what they’re talking about. They are professors, usually PhDs or have some kind of doctorate in the field on which their textbook is based.

Or, if they are businessmen, they are usually, or have been, CEOs with decades of experience in some of the most well-known corporations around the world. In most cases, perhaps with the exception of business books, the contents are reviewed by peers for accuracy of content. The peers themselves are also experts in the field of the book they are reviewing.

The internet, on the other hand, is a vastly different animal. Anyone with access to an internet connection and a keyboard can write about anything and call themselves authors.

They don’t have to have any qualifications and little or no experience in the field about which they’re writing. What’s more, there’s no peer review of the contents before they are published by the writer. That’s another thing, the writer is also the publisher as a result of which we now have ‘writers’ galore.

All this makes it very difficult for a reader to determine the reliability of the contents of a blog or website. The reader too needs to know enough about the subject, or spend hours scouring other websites to corroborate information.

Without that time spent, the information taken away by the reader from just a single site may have little or no value. That in turn contributes to the very limited knowledge of the reader, or the lack of it.

This is especially obviously when reading some of the social media comments made on current events. People read one site and then quote from it. Sometimes they might be right and sometimes they might be very wrong. Do these people think they’re smart? Unfortunately they do.

Now, apparently, research carried out by a University in Texas, America, found that people tend to feel smarter and more confident at being able to find the right answer to questions after having repeatedly googled answers to previous questions.  Maybe it’s because they have been right some of the time or maybe no one has corroborated or challenged the information they have obtained. The problem is that results of a search engine are somewhat…what’s the word…”’’””””rigged’ depending upon the persons locations.

So if you’re sitting in Timbuktoo, your results will be very Timbuctoo related and not UAE, UK or US related. Therefore, the answers you have obtained from a search engine may not be complete.

This might be true of people who’ve always managed to find the right answers but imagine if these people have always got their answers wrong because they didn’t do their research properly?

In my opinion, this is where a textbook comes in handy. It is not location biased and the advantage of reading an actual textbook is that you can highlight passages with highlighter pen and annotate the passages which in turn helps you retain the correct information and, hence, makes you smarter. LOL.