Two words: Confirmation bias.
That's why the internet doesn't make anyone smarter. More able to regurgitate the factoids they just googled perhaps, but that has nothing to do with being smarter if they can't fully understand and synthesize those factoids into something resembling coherence.
Exactly, goldcatt.
I grew up having to do actual research to find information. You remember that wacky place called a LIBRARY, the Dewey Decimal System, the Card Catalogue, things like that. Todays kids don't know what any of them are, nevermind how to use them. Not like they'd be willing to take the time to actually read the book and extract the information that way, even if they could find the book.
Oh, I remember it well. And call me crazy, but I still prefer to do my serious reading on ink and paper. And my work related to it with bookmarks and highlighters and notepads and pens.
I also go out of my way to look up both sides of an issue before setting my mind in stone, if I can find both sides of every issue that is. It rarely (but not never) changes my view, but the old saying is true: One must understand their opponent's argument before they can truly understand their own. The old basics of the art of persuasion seem to be lost even on the grownups for the most part.
Add those two things together, the confirmation bias and the sheer laziness of copy and pasting a half-digested factoid from google, and the internet really does make a lot of people dumb. And yet there are a lot of great tools and primary sources out there that make it a potentially fantastic tool if it would only be used that way.
