So Much Information

In one of Carr's digressions titled "on the buoyancy of IQ scores," he quotes James Flynn in saying, "raw IQ scores have been going up three points a decade since World War II." I think this is absolutely shocking. I have often heard, and I do not tend to agree, that our species is getting dumber from all the social media at our hands. I haven't heard this from any experts in the field, so I have no specific person to quote on the matter, but nonetheless, it has been talked about among people. The internet gives us easy access to pretty much any piece of information we want. I have witnessed this firsthand while researching for my research essay. I do not even have to read an entire book to get the information I want. Google highlights specific pieces of information pertaining to my topic in that particular book. In the past, we have had to sift through the library to even find a good book, often having to read numerous pages before deciding whether that book is relevant for our topic or not. When a book was finally decided upon, we had to read the entire book and take notes about each part we wanted to add to our paper. It is long and tedious work and much of the information may have been useless or irrelevant to us.
Now, if we want to know something all we have to do is "google" it and thousands of hits will come up. We can have our answer in a matter of seconds. Is this why we are getting smarter? If we have ever wondered about a random fact, all we have to do is look it up on the internet. I think this is why we know so much more now than in previous years. With each passing decade, the internet gets more and more advanced and that information is even easier to access. This can even been seen in the UML library website. If you want to find a reliable scholarly article pertaining to a specific topic, it is very easy to find one within minutes. You do not even have to read the entire article to decided if the article is what you are looking for or not. Everything is at the tip of our fingertips. Pages and pages of information can be absorbed within minutes. Where does it end? Or does it even end? I don't think I could even wrap my head around it. The odds are too staggering. Everyday the amount of information on the internet increases. Articles are posted. Information is added to online encyclopedias. Even people's opinions are uploaded in blog entries, "tweets," and Facebook statuses. There have been numerous times when I have logged onto Facebook or Twitter and everyone has posted about a particular event that has just happened. I usually had no idea this event happened, but I can put the pieces together by simply reading through the posts. I don't even have to watch the news to know what is going on in the world. It is all on the internet. I can only imagine what it is going to be like in the next few years to come as the amount information only increases.
- Bridget Meehan