The world of google.

[morrocan roll]

I find it amusing and a little disturbing that ...you can type anything into this thing and get an answer.
An answer that almost imediatley gives some people an opinion. Some people see it as knowledge ...instant knowledge.
No work or experience involved ...no common sense ...just press a button and your informed ...some of the advice given out in here is so obviously googled ...is that good advice i wonder.
People can appear to be highly knowledgable when realy they know diddly shit. Can wisdom be attained this way ...is it good for us in the long run?

[Teh_Gerbil]

No because it is obvious to see when people structue thier arguments via google, and not attained knowledge.

This makes them easy to ridicule, and the rule of the internet prevails.

[T-Kay]

The way I see it, google is just a search engine that allows you to find what others have written. It does not help you to evaluate the credibility of those sources, nor does it help you finding out if what you're looking at is complete bullshit or not. Google lets you find information, but information is not necessarily knowledge. There are some "social disciplines" within computational science that aims to discover the subtle line between information and knowledge, by the way.

Since I'm on the way out now, I'm going to have a sense of irony and ask people interested to google it...:P

[DG]

I use it as a calculator or simply to find out the local time in a different country

for instance type in:
3*43534543

or

time in Auckland

and you get the answer

[otter]

People can appear to be highly knowledgable when realy they know diddly shit. Can wisdom be attained this way ...is it good for us in the long run?

people can use it to find other people's views and arguments, or answers straight away but without any knowledge of how the answer was obtained or worked out they fall short. people can appear to be highly knowledgeable by regurgitating the argument they google but with nothing else to back up that argument its not thinking for yourself so not wisdom or knowledge its just being reciting. knowing the answer to the square root of 25 by typing it into an internet search engine for example is no good if you don't know how to work it out or any other square root for yourself. the test of knowledge / wisdom i think is the application of information.

[I'm With Stupid]

People can appear to be highly knowledgable when realy they know diddly shit. Can wisdom be attained this way ...is it good for us in the long run?

Well if we could all only have knowledge that we have aquired first hand, then no-one would know anything. I know that Mt. Everest is the highest mountain in the world, but I've never even confirmed it's existance with my own eyes. In fact, if you gave me a photo of a mountain and asked me to say whether or not it's Mt. Everest, I wouldn't have the slightest clue. It's no different from studying history at university. You weren't there, you're just reading other people's accounts and opinions. Why does that count as knowledge on a subject, but learning through Google doesn't? If everyone had to find out for themselves that fire is hot, then we wouldn't have got very far as a species. Bullshit is alive and well in all walks of life. I don't see how having more accesable information makes it more likely. If anything, it makes it much easier to sniff it out and prove wrong.

[I'm With Stupid]

Fucking piece of shit.