Ethics Newsline®

Newsline readers offered some interesting reactions to last week’s column by Rushworth Kidder, in which he questioned whether memorization is passé — and, moreover, whether a generation trained to use the Internet to summon snippets of information will form a hierarchy of knowledge and know, in effect, what to look for when searching for an answer.

In addition, Dr. Kidder asked: “Where will they form the taste for words, the relish for deftly expressed ideas and pithy epitomes of wisdom that help shape thought? And if they find such treasures, will the insistent bleating of the email grant them enough leisure, combined with enough concentration, to memorize anything?”

One reader posits that the problem went beyond the lack of ability to memorize: “‘They’ — being anyone under 30– are certainly techno-savvy with their iPods, iPhones and iBooks; however, when it comes to thinking through a problem to a solution, ‘they’ are totally baffled. If the answer isn’t found in the first screen page of a Google search ‘they’ move on to other issues.”

Another reader claims that there is a deeper problem behind the seemingly random regurgitation of result from search engines: “Google attempts to present you with the most popular search results, not the pages most relevant to your information needs. Google is great at locating the most popular viewpoint on any subject, but to learn

alternative viewpoints, a searcher will often have to click beyond the first five pages of results, something Google’s users rarely do.”

– Compiled by Ethics Newsline® editor Carl Hausman