Nicholas Carr, blogger, journalist, and author, most recently of The Big Switch, wrote this short but thought- provoking piece in this month’s issue of the Atlantic called Is Google Making us Stupid?: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

It’s a succinct and readable discussion not only of some of the possible downside of living so much of our lives on the Net, but also a nice mini lecture on some of the positive and negative impacts of technology on culture, going all the way back to Socrates’ classic concerns that writing would reduce all of our abilities to remember, and to devalue oral communications.

I’ve been thinking of a related issue for a little bit of time too–what does the Google mindset do to the serious researcher? Is it making us lazy, more passive, more willing to define research as tapping a few words into a search engine and accepting the top 10 results as our result?

Librarians and information professionals, academics, grad students (I hope) and truly savvy searchers know that good research is much more that this of course. But I know I’m as guilty as anyone out there when I turn to lean back in my desk chair and call up my home page Google to find an answer, source, or piece of information to a research question I’m pursuing.

The key to me it seems is to remember to be mindful that good research is (or at least begins) as an inner directed process. That is: taking the time to figure out what you really want to discover, why you want it, what you’re going to do with it, what is the most likely place to find it/who would know (including sources off the Net), and taking the steps and process you need to do the work to find the best sources, most efficiently. It’s not tapping words out into a search engine, or even worse, relying on an automated or “intelligent” solution that sends you articles, blog postings, news etc. that the system thinks or assumes you want, based on some algorithm, past search behaviour, etc.

Even in the age of the Net and Google, to truly perform research still means making an effort and taking an ACTIVE not passive approach to the process. It still means thinking.

I’ve been wondering why I haven’t been able to get anyone from Dialog to do an interview on “the future of Dialog”…it’s being acquired by ProQuest!

That’s big news in the info industry: see the press release from ProQuest here.

Okay, so this has nothing to do with business research, but as someone who has spent decades (OK, so I turned 50 last week!) studying information, and how people use and analyze information, this finding by Pew has really got me stumped. I’d love to get some comments by people who have a theory as to why this is so–here it is:

This recent Pew Study, sadly, but not surprisingly, shows that Republicans are much less inclined to view global warming as a serious problem than Democrats.

What is baffling to me, though, (other than the fact that a public safety/scientific data issue like global warming is still seen as a political issue in the U.S.), is that the survey shows that :

“…for Republicans, unlike Democrats, higher education is associated with GREATER [caps added] skepticism that human activity is causing global warming. Only 19% of Republican college graduates say that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming and it is caused by human activity,while 31% of Republicans with less education say the same.”

How to explain this? Speculations, theories?

I find this really confounding….