In a recent interview with Google’s User Experience Research Manager, Patrick Larvie, interviewed by Gerry Gaffney on User Experience Podcast (uxpod.com), asks: “ [Google has] had a very interesting effect on the teenagers that I encounter...[they just type] in sort of some random quasi-spelled fashion and [assumes that]… Google will fix it’.” “I hope that that’s true.” Responds Larvie, He points out that English “spelling is not intuitive” and “is a real barrier” when dealing with a search interface. What he finds as a solution is to: “continue to try to make sure that [teenagers] don’t have to know how to spell everything on their own” in order to make a more sufficient Google search and experience through various helpful tools.
This is one of many solutions that Google has in store for the growing generations who depend on this interface as a main source of information, research and know-how in our Internet dominated world. The big question is: are these solutions resulting in a increasingly smarter “Google generation” or are these so-called tools impairing cognitive process and problem solving among younger and older generations alike?
Tom Satwicz comments in his article “Google as Distributed Cognition”, on Larvie’s quote within the interview: “So we will continue to try to make sure that [teenagers] don’t have to know how to spell everything on [their] own.” He focuses on this section of the interview because it shows how there is a defined joint effort between the user and Google when solving problems, finding information or browsing the web. This idea of Google doing good by taking away natural cognitive processes like spelling or memory in order to “immediatize” searches and remove possible “barriers” that “get in the way”. In their eyes this is progression and innovation, but in reality this is manipulating, pampering and preparing societies to be strictly dependent on a new form of unintuitive intelligence, what Patrick sees as Google’s intended design. What we see nowadays is a deterioration of effort, focus and time put into learning because of this dependency and/or over-availability.
Is Google making us stupid or are we to blame? Next post might just answer this question...
it is shocking when thinking that the "young" generation of today does not really know how to spell simple words and probably wont have to, as everything is written electronically with an automatic spell check. I remember how i used to struggle in school with my spelling and that it was a shame making mistakes. Of course i see it as a great help for me today, when using Google and it guesses what i mean when i miss-spell something, but when teenagers don't actually know how to spell certain words and don't have to know it because they know Google will know, that is just really upsetting. I wouldn't say Google is making us stupid, but it is definitely encouraging us not to spell properly if you know what i mean. When i'm looking for something on Google, i sometimes don't even realize i made a spelling mistake and in the end am grateful when it corrects me, but do not even realize what my mistake was in the end.
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