Abstract

”Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was the question posed by the Internet commentator Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic magazine in July 2008. His article attracted a great deal of discussion about the extent to which changes in our media ecosystem brought about by the Internet were changing our cognitive capacity. Is it, for example, leading to shorter attention spans? Is the fact that information on virtually everything is routinely available from a powerful search engine remapping our neural circuitry? Are we losing the capacity to read deeply and thoughtfully simply because it has become so easy to surf the tsunami of sources and publications unleashed by the Net? This is an important question for educators and learners alike – and indeed for society at large. To explore it in depth, Wolfson has assembled a panel of experts from its members under the chairmanship of the President of the Royal Society.

Speakers:

Ian Goodyer, Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Cambridge

Anna Jones, Lee Librarian, Wolfson College

Andrew Herbert, Director, Microsoft Research, Cambridge

John Naughton, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology, the Open University

Chairman: Lord Rees FRS , President of the Royal Society