In second last week of our course Understanding Media by Understanding Google we have to answer question similar to mentioned above. Here is my take on that.
Lets say our referred in the question is me. While at work or otherwise when I am engaged with my primary activity I do Google searches and browse the internet to somehow enhance and deepen my understand with it. Here is my observation :-
- About 70% of the time that would help me to finish my primary activity or job quickly like finding howto instructions to setup a development environment etc.
- For rest 30% of the it can’t help like stop a crying a baby.
Because of our high success rate we hope to find every answer on the internet even when our primary activity has more to do with personal relations, friends. Other than high success rate we get answers within few minutes, even if we have to skim through multiple search results. This increases our expectation at all fronts of life. And we end up :-
- doing multitask.
- having urge to be connected with internet all the time.
- not paying attention to content of one link as we want to skim through more.
- responding to non-urgent stuff urgently like FB post, chat pings.
- not paying enough attention to the person in front of us.
As mentioned in Joe Kraus video our mind is not designed to do multitask as computers and we are 40% less productive if we do so. I think this true in most of the cases. Only is very few cases context switching between multiple things/work helps and we have to careful when we do that. On the contrary all the internet giants are trying to make internet as part of everyday. They are urging you keep connected all the time. Because this means business as mentioned in Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid? article.
Clearly the choice is ours and we shouldn’t use the technology at the cost of personal relation.
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