Are Search Engines Making Our Lives Easier or Hurting Us?

Lev, Grossman."How Computers Know What We Want-Before We Do." Time Magazine. 27 May 2010. Web. 28 January 2011

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In the magazine article “How Computers Know What We Want Before We Do,” author Lev Grossman discusses how recommendation search engines are taking over our social lives. He goes into telling how when people use these search engines to make a decision it is actually just giving the person results from the previous users. Also it takes out the communication with others, for instance back in the day a video store clerk referred movies to people and now Netflix and a variety of other recommendation search engines basically tell people what to watch not based on their personnel preference, but by other peoples votes of what they have liked in the past. Over the last ten years recommendation engines have become abundant over the web. According to a report by industry analyst Forrester, one-third of the people who notice a recommendation engine on the Internet end up buying something based on the recommendation engines results. These search engines process outstanding quantities of data and use very high-level math. They are trying to second-guess a human form of behavior.

The author Lev Grossman’s point of view is that these recommendation engines are not as reliable as they may seem. They are recommending things that other people want and like instead of letting a person actually make a genuine decision about something based on there preferences. The author mentions that recommendation engines are a world of making choices, and the world usually cant get enough of that. He goes to say that recommendation engines are the worst enemy of the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. The recommendation engines keep people from experiencing new things because they are designed to keep people in a comfy rut, and keep people in the same category instead of allowing people to experience new things that could also bring happiness. These search engines have the reputation of making people end up right where they stated. Even though some people may see this as making their life easier, the author seems to feel as if they are trapping people and not allowing people to use their own brain to the best of their ability.

Helping Made Easier

Microsoft is a monopoly and only they have the codes and ability to help people with problems on their computers, and that reminds me of Charter cable in athens. It really gets annoying when my cable has a problem, and I have to call Charter and they take their sweet time to come fix it. unlike linux that is a free software thats anyone that is familiar with its system is capable of fixing problems. Linux made a copyleft in their software so that people could change or add to their software, but when they passed it on to someone they had to give it for free. In the film they mentioned that 10 million people use GNU/Linux and don't even know it.

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What Google Could Lead To

Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic. The Atlantic Monthly Group, Jul/August 2008. Web. 18 January 2011.

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Nicholas Carr, author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, believes that the Internet is remapping and changing the way we think. Nicholas tells us that the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a great effort. He starts to get fidgety, and begins to look for something else to occupy his time when he reads long passages. He feels as if he is always dragging his willful brain back to the text. Research that once required days in the stacks or review rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes on the Internet. The author states that “Once he was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now he zips along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University, states that the style of reading on the Internet may be weakening our mental connection that forms when we read deeply and without distraction. Nicholas also feels that a computers ability of storing information causes people not to use their memory to its full potential. Nicholas feels that he can get more out of reading a book in a quiet room, than reading online and having millions of distractions just a click away on the internet.

In this article Nicholas appears to believe that the Internets easy accessibility to answers has and will continue to make people lazy and not use their brain to its full potential. In a interview with Newsweek Sergey Brin, a gifted young man who founded Google said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Nicholas feels that in the online world there is little place of contemplation and uncertainty that is needed to make people interact with one another. Socrates states that people are “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” The author feels that the Internet only seems to be chipping away his capacity for concentration and contemplation. Many of the author’s buddies have said the more they use the Internet, the more they have to battle to pay attention on long pieces of writing because Google search engine makes people not have to use their brain as much as they would in a world without Google.