The Google Effect

Recently, Merriam-Webster added the verb google to its collegiate dictionary, demonstrating just how frequently we use the Google search engine. What’s the surprise? Google’s powerful algorithms scour the web for results that provide answers to both straightforward questions and hard-to-interpret queries. With the seemingly exponential rate of content creation on the internet, this information spans culture, lifestyle, technicalities, academia, media, and just about else in between, allowing us to embrace Google as a potentially quick solution to problems of any type. The digital framework that we as students now have access to  instantly pipes information onto our computer screens. This sounds like a huge and rather beneficial advancement for our human race, as it truly places a myriad of knowledge right at our fingertips. However, how well does Google’s convenience coexist with our natural learning process? Studies have shown that the phenomenon of digital amnesia, also known as the Google Effect, reveals a more concerning side to the ubiquitous use of this platform.

Though attached to a specific company in name, the Google Effect actually refers to our tendency to forget readily available information aggregated on the internet. The first paper to propose this phenomenon dates back to July 2011, and blames the perceived high availability of information for our propensity to not recall that information. They conducted a total of four sub-studies, which together concluded that we remember how and where to access facts better than we remember the facts themselves. In a sense, we rely on the vastness of the internet to externally and collectively store our memories, grounded in the belief that we can retrieve them later. We can draw multiple practical conclusions from this experiment, and the follow-up studies that validated its results: 1)We find it more difficult to remember something when it’s easily accessible, 2) we have gotten better at remembering how to retrieve information, or 3) a combination of the above two conclusions. When we bring this within the scope of education, we must look at both the benefits and potential downsides that accompany Google. Only then can we continue to use it effectively while mitigating many of the drawbacks.

For one, the Google Effect can cause students to build a heavy reliance on the internet for our learning. The underlying assumption that causes the effect to happen in the first place is the permanence of the information, the fact that we subconsciously assume nothing will sever our connection to it. What happens if we find ourselves in a situation with no internet access (how could that POSSIBLY happen?!) and we still need to learn? Chances are, we would scramble externally for the necessary foundational knowledge, whereas it should have stuck with us the first time around. Yet during the first time around, we don’t internalize the knowledge soundly because we “know” we can just find it later. This cycle of dependence will affect students in one way or another, and could ultimately revolutionize our entire thought process to be more incomplete. Under that reality, our brain would only take us partway to the answer, and the search engine would muscle through the rest. We must stay vigilant in not taking these resources for granted and thinking that they’ll remain available at any time.

When Google spoon-feeds us an answer, we lose an opportunity to challenge ourselves. Though no definitive research exists for this specific aspect of the Google Effect, I believe that if we continue to associate learning, Google, and low-effort, we may fall into the lull of complacency in terms of thinking critically. From there, the complacency could cause our memory to atrophy; our neurons are just like muscles and must fire in order to stay sharp. We might begin to think, “Since the end result is the retrieval of information, why take the harder route when I can just let Google do the thinking?” Though we cannot predict the magnitude of this shift, we will have less desire to really push and engage our minds when faced with learning. In reality, the end result far surpasses just the retrieval of information and should also reflect innovation and creation. That involves much more than a few keystrokes and clicks.

Students should use Google in a way that doesn’t inhibit our natural learning with shortcuts that lead to more dependence and less critical thinking. Search engines and the internet can’t act as the sole means to the end, but rather as one of the many critical thinking tools in our possession. Education and the internet’s relationship must proceed with caution as we travel deeper into the digital age.