This includes decreased attention spans, increased anxiety, lower performance on cognitive tasks, and diminishing social skills.

There has been a great deal of research that suggests that increasing dependence on the digital world has negative consequences. We are less likely to digest or deeply encode information, and instead, only remember that we can always “Google it”. The Google effect suggests that the digital world is changing the way that we think. We may no longer waste effort remembering something that can easily be looked online, but if the quality of that information is poor, the Internet is actually doing little to improve our intelligence and effectiveness. We work collectively with the digital world, splitting the burden of encoding and storing information, known as transactive memory. 2Īdditionally, there is evidence that we do not evaluate the information we encounter online, 2 which can be dangerous because a lot of information on the Internet is inaccurate.Īlternatively, the Google effect demonstrates an effectiveness when it comes to prioritizing information, where we have learnt to use the Internet as a repository for knowledge. While the Internet has opened up a new realm of possibilities for what information we can obtain, when that information isn’t being committed to knowledge, our engagement with the world can become very shallow.Īlthough some people believe the Google effect is a sign of being technologically savvy, there is no evidence that we are getting any better at researching information. The ways in which we learn, problem-solve, and recall information are all impacted by the Google effect.

Google kaspersky lab