Nowadays, the Internet is so widely used that it had already become part of our life. We spend most of our time on the Internet no matter when we doing our work or relaxing ourselves. For example, we use search engine to look for information for our work and we also use social media such as YouTube to watch video to relax ourselves. The Internet is unarguably created a huge impact on our lives. In present days, many studies found out that the Internet is affecting our intelligence as we depend too much on the Internet. This is because the Internet plays a very important role in our life and it has become the biggest tools for us to complete our daily tasks such as getting and sending information, getting assistance in education and research field, bank online transfer, reserving vehicle for traveling and keeping up the news around the globe. It’s an undisputed fact and the one which has been established repeatedly that the Internet is affecting our intelligence by improving the quality of it in the form of providing comfort and ease, however, the increasing dependency is silently taking a toll and it’s alarming. Overall, it’s believed that technology is making us smarter and wiser by providing us with newer things on daily basis, the increase in its need is harming us in a way that’s largely going unnoticed. For example, we already getting used to having the Internet with us, so that whenever we need information to complete certain tasks, we will just use Google to search it instead of figure it out by our own. It is so easy yet so fast to get the information that you need in just a single click, it seems like the Internet is improving our life, but some studies have shown that it also has a negative impact on our intelligence and, overall, our brain.
Prior studies have shown that the Internet is slowly affecting our intelligence. These studies also prove that trends indicate that our originality and high-order thinking are gradually disappearing as we habitually rely on the Internet every day. One of the studies from Nicholas Carr state that our dependence on the Internet to research others opinions is hurting our originality and higher order thinking. We are becoming more inclined to share the ideas of others, rather than personally thinking by our own and developing our own unique ideas (Carr). People are also getting more isolated, unadventurous and less inquisitive as people are able see what they wanted to see with the Internet (Neil). In another related study, it was found that when some people are talking about some difficult topic, it only took them about 5 seconds for someone to take out their smartphone and google (Ciarcia). In this case, people are just taking answer from the Internet rather than thinking and making connection on their own during schools or businesses. Ultimately, the Internet is able to bring us endless of information, but depends too much on using the Internet to look for solution instead of thinking out solution by our own will slowly making us suppress our capability to think critically by not getting our brain ready to achieve higher-order thinking, and we no longer fill our memory banks.
Summing up all the above, we can conclude that the Internet can certainly increase our productivity, but it does not necessarily make us better. The Internet is good for us, but when we are overly dependent on it without training our thinking brain, the Internet will really affect our intelligence and our higher order thinking.