Is Google Making Us Stupid and Facebook as a Crowd?
The author begins this article by a brief description of the closing scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A space odyssey when Dave dismantles the memory circuits of Hal, an artificial brain that controls the space ship. He feels that someone is tinkering with the brain to make it change. He also goes into saying he doesn’t enjoy reading anymore of any length of time because he can’t really concentrate on the book. He’s not thinking the way he used to think. He can feel it most wrongly when he is reading. He begins looking for something else to do. Over a decade he’s been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing the great database of the so called internet. He states the Web has been a godsend to him as a writer. He feels instead of being a diver in the seas of worlds, he sees himself as a guy on a jet ski. He confessed recentely that he has stopped reading books altogher. We’ve been reading more since tat 1970’s and 1980’s, when the television was our medium choice. “We are not only what we read” says Wolf, a developmental psychologist. She states the “efficiency and immediacy above all else, may be weakening out capacity for the kind of deep/complex words of prose commonplace” The net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. In inject the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the others media it has absorbed. The internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information. In the article, titled “Facebook in a Crowd” Hal Niedzviecki discusses his experience with Facebook . He stated he logged on Facebook and realized that he was very close to having 700 “friends”. In his own words, he was “absurdly proud of how many cyberpals, connections, acquaintances, and even strangers I’d managed to sign up.” But this number was made him uneasy. He had fallen out with friends he’s spent a lot of time with. He was disconnected with a few other ones for the usual reason—jobs in other cities, family life limiting social time. He was as much to blame. He had a 2-year-old kid of his own. Added to that he was workaholic irritability or mysterious association with the Masons from which was derive an instant network. He said he had very few real friends. So he decided to have a Facebook party to get to know some of his new friends. Niedzviecki invited all 700 of his “friends” to a local bar for a party. People could respond to one of three options: “Attending,” “Maybe Attending” and “Not Attending.” Fifteen said they would be there, and sixty said they might be there. He guessed somewhere around 20 would show up. On the evening of the party, he shower, shaved etc. He splashed on his manly perfume. Put on some new pants and his favorite shirt. Brimming with optimism, he headed over to the neighborhood watering hole and waited, and waited, and waited so more. Eventually, only one person showed up. He chatted with his new friend well his potential new friend, Paula. Doing his best to pretend he wasn’t dismayed or embarrassed. But he was too self-conscious to be genuine. He kept on apologizing for the lack of people who weren’t there. Paula was nice about assuring him that people just felt shy about meeting new people, she said herself had almost decided not to show up.