Stephen Downes links to Amy Burvall on her daughter’s reliance on her friend Ellie as a source of information.
I think the question in her antipenultimate paragraph: “Do we crave more temporal, less formal interactions, even if it means the information we receive is at risk for being less accurate?” should be answered with a resounding “Yes!” – which means that it is quite possible that the way we most naturally use networked knowledge is making us stupider rather than smarter. Of course other possibilities exist and the network also allows us to access central sources which are subject to corrective review from a wide variety of directions, so contra Nicholas Carr I am not worried about Google Making Us Stupid but neither do I share David Weinberger’s confidence that Networked Knowledge Makes Us Smarter.
In any case, it’s the long-range structure of the network that matters, and the evidence from Nov 8 and June 24 is that the network is disconnected to such an extent that those of us in the “smart” bubble were unaware of the extent of the “dumb” one.
Source: #rawthought: Your Ellie – On the Primacy of Networked Knowledge | AmusED via #downes