Juan's a jolly swagman and other signs of Internet stupidity

There's been a bit of talk out there this week about Nicholas Carr's The Atlantic online article Is Google making us stupid? This article is a good read.
Over four pages Nicholas worries that deep reading is now an effort after years of being able to get a quick information fix via the world wide web and points to concerns that the type of technology we are now using is changing the way we read and think. That surfing the net is turning us into information browsers rather than critical thinkers.

I don't believe that the human brain and individual neurological response to telecommunications technology has changed all that much over the last thirty years or so.
What is more likely to be affecting those expressing a disinclination to read lengthy books etc., is the effects of aging on brain and stamina.
We are all getting that much older! Quite a few of us will probably show evidence of dementia before our bodies give out.

The young are of course acting just as we all did - using what's at hand to try and carve a difference to mark independence and group indentity.

What the Internet and Google does demonstrate however is that we now like to share how gullible or stupid we all are with the whole wide world.
In days past urban myths travelled by word of mouth or turned up as page fillers in the side bars of newspapers such as The Mirror and The Daily Telegraph or magazines like Post.
Now they are found all over the Web dressed up as new and news. They flood our email inboxes at the slightest provocation.
What is worse, just as many people as before uncritically accept this so-called information as fact.
Myths which after all these years are no more sophisticated than that old chestnut about a spider in the beehive hairdo or the tale of seeing Kentucky Fried take delivery of something for their commercial kitchen that wasn't chicken.

So we currently have web pages or emails telling us that:
Britain is trying a modern version of sending convicts to the colonies and we need to beware
A previously convicted terrorist was one of those who flew a plane into the Twin Towers
The common word for human waste came from a cargo direction to ship high in transport
The word news is made up of the first letters of points of the compass
NASA's climate change data was affected by the Y2k bug
John Howard never had a father.

Neither the technology nor Google is making us stupid. We are what we are and what we are creates most of what is the Internet.
Therefore we are quite safe from Google's Machiavellian dream of a world run by Artificial Intelligence.com.
And, no the Waltzing Matilda swagman wasn't Spanish.