Is Google making us stupid?

How much does Google really help? Some my say having access to Google make things easier, some will say it is making us dumber. Although it does make things a bit easier, how much do we actually need Google? Too many of us are ignoring the fact that we have billions of books in these buildings  called Libraries.
In Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Dumb?” he brings forth the argument about Google dumbing us down or not and how much it takes away from our capability to focus and want to read a full passage word for word.  In my opinion Google doesn’t make us stupid but it is definitely making us lazy. I remember my second semester of my Junior year I was home schooled and it was so easy for me to just look up answers on Google instead of actually having to do the assignment, after a while I realized I was just cheating myself. I might have missed out on textbook information but I was always able to (and still can) turn to Google to look up anything I am interested in and build up my knowledge about a certain subject. Depending on how you look at it Google is good and bad because it’s not making us stupid, just lazy.
It is also mentioned in the article about the way we use clocks, we have learned to obey it. What would we do with out a clock? jobs, school, dates, dinner, and waking up would be thrown off. “In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.” Couldn’t have said it any better myself.
We need to take a step back and realize how much we let little gadgets and gizmos control our life. It’s all about moderation, if we learned how to limit ourselves in what we let other things do for us then things in our head would be far better and more sharp than they are now.

Accidentally Spiritual

In William Powers recent blog he mentions how the screen was devouring the rest of his life and I think now a days too many people are letting that happen. We aren’t realizing how much we let technology take over our lives. It becomes a daily ritual, check Facebook, check email, text messaging, or just playing games. All of this happens right when we wake up and right before we go to bed…every…single..day. You would be lying if you said you didn’t know what I was talking about.
I remember at the beginning of the semester when we were getting into Powers life and learning about his “Internet Sabbath” and thinking it is very much a religious form. He gives up the internet for the weekend all the time just as we fast or give something up for lent.
We get so consumed by things that we do not realize it most of the time so I think if we too Powers approach it would be a lot healthier. We would gain back the time the we were leaving behind with family members and dear friends. Just because we are all together in one room doesn’t exactly mean that we are all paying attention and using that time to interact with one another. Too many of us will sit in a room with three or more people and we will on be on our phones the whole time, letting out a couple words every so often. We need to start limiting ourselves and get more connected with everyone eye to eye rather than just through technology.

like, like, like

I was just having a conversation about this not too long ago with my younger sister. We have noticed that the amount of attention you get on social networks is based off of how many followers and likes you receive. It really is kind of sad, some really talented people aren’t getting the recognition that they deserve. For example, there are tons of make up tutorials on YouTube but if you only have a few thousand followers versus a million followers what do you think people are going to watch? You can be an amazing make up artist but it is all about the followers and feed back that you get that will get people to take time on you.
Some people actually work for the likes and followers that they have by putting out positive photos, videos, quotes, and blogs while others just take certain revealing photos just for the likes and followers.

In my opinion most people who are promoting certain brands are sell outs, they are doing it for the attention. They want to do it for the money and to become more popular which definitely get to their heads.. I’ve seen it happen before. When doing something you should do it because you are passionate about it, not because you’re going to gain riches and fame.
For me, when I post certain pictures or videos on Instagram it is not for the attention at all. When I post things it is so my followers can enjoy little parts of my life, things I enjoy, make up, hair, nails, things like that. It doesn’t matter to me if I get 300 likes or 10 likes as long as people genuinely enjoy what I post. If people enjoyed it to the point where I was getting passed around Instagram or YouTube and becoming bigger and even getting to the point where I was earning money for things things then of course I wouldn’t be complaining, but thats not why I do what I do.

Brain Stamina

Hyper attention or deep attention? Which one would you say you are? For myself, I would have to say Hyper Attention. I constantly need to be stimulated, I can’t sit in a classroom and just focus on one things the whole time. I need different things thrown my way to get my brain going. I don’t think  I have ever been able to put myself in the deep attention category, I just don’t learn that way. I feel many of us lack the deep attention, so many of us are used to doing so many different things because we are always one our phones and computers doing multiple things while on them. Our mind gets so used to it that when we need to switch to deep attention it is nearly impossible.
Trying to bring out the deep attention in my brain was pretty hard up until I started doing make up, I need to have that focus on just one thing so that I can get the job done perfectly. I think we should start off there, applying it to what we love and expanding from there until we can control both types of attention.
For those who have always been the deep attention type, I think they should try doing more activities and play brain games to get it going and used to different things at once. This would help exercise the brain and help it grow to hold more knowledge and to focus on multiple things at once, it’s good to stimulate the brain.
Whether you have deep or hyper attention it is always going to be a challenge to achieve the other but in the end it will definitely help whether it be with school or different jobs.