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.

There’s been tons of good stuff written over the years on how libraries are/need to be evolving to meet the needs of the information age, but I’m really looking forward to reading the NY Review of Books review of The Library in the New Age, by Robert Darnton.  Not only to learn about this book, but because whenever I read a review in the NY Review of Books, I also typically receive an instant and compelling up to date education on the subject matter of the reviewed book by an intelligent and thoughtful reviewer.

The review begins as follows:

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.

Somewhere, around 4000 BC, humans learned to write….

This is pretty off topic, but this article (”The Nations Borders Now Guarded by the Net) published in the New York Times this morning really got to me.

Apparently, border guards are doing Internet searches to find information about people as they cross the border (here, a person from Vancouver) to find out if there is anything undesirable about the person coming in that should prevent their entry to this country. In the case written about this morning, a psychotherapist with no criminal record who wrote an article in a journal a few years ago about experimenting with LSD decades ago was confronted with the article, and then when he admitted writing it, he was told he could not come in. (!!!)

I don’t know where to start on commenting on this use of the Internet and doing research this way, –assuming the facts are correct in this story—and without even getting into the ridiculousness of the actual policy decision itself (if you admit you’ve used drugs decades ago and you cannot come in this country) but here’s what I think about this whole Internet search aspect of the story:

1. Doing an off the cuff Net search to do serious research on persons currently entering the border? Absurd.
2. Drawing broad conclusions about the character of a person based on their digital trail of what they wrote or was located on the Internet. Even more absurd! Jeffrey Rosen wrote about this problem in his books like The Naked Crowd and The Unwanted Gaze
3. Having the above two processes be acceptable national border policy? Amazingly absurd

If border guards’ Googling people’s names on their PC as they come across the border is going to be an accepted procedure policy on making judgements on people and who should be let in here or not, God help us all!