What's Cool about StumbleUpon

                StumbleUpon- Pro

                StumbleUpon is a website that caters to the user.  It allows you to choose topics and takes random pages from the internet about those topics and shows them to you after which point you can like it, saving it your profile, or dislike it, preventing the page from being shown again. Over time, it learns more of what you like, giving you the best content in your selected categories. In a sense, it makes the internet your own. StumbleUpon organizes the internet in a way that allows you to discover what you might never know otherwise and eliminate the things you never wish to think about. It is also good for the mind. In Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (2010), he states that the brain craves stimulus and that the internet provides it in a way that causes activity in all areas of the brain, so much so that it can be a mental exercise for the elderly. It also can provide too much for our brains to handle by receiving too many sources of stimuli at once, “the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it”(page 118). StumbleUpon can appeal to both, by giving a nearly endless amount of content to keep the brain busy and stimulated but by narrowing it down to topics you enjoy and know it lessens the total amount of stimuli and eases into new stimuli.

To use Carr’s analogy, if we imagine the transfer of working memory into long term memory as filling a bathtub then the internet equates to “many information faucets, all going full blast” while a book is transferring information “thimbleful by thimbleful.”(pages 124-125) StumbleUpon essentially is the plumber who takes some of the faucets out and reduces the water flow to more your liking, allowing for deeper concentration than the internet initially provides by easing that cognitive load into something much more manageable. It also helps build communities of like minded people by bringing you and others to the content enjoyed.

 In the digital age, the way we learn and develop is changing thanks to the internet. Like many before us, we are in the twilight of a new age as the old ways of learning start to fade and the digital age begins to rise. StumbleUpon is the perfect site for our time of transition, allowing for better browsing of the internet for the minds of all generations.

What's NOT cool about StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a site that lets you rate pages, choose the type of content you want to see, and then suggests other similar pages for you. You can also use a friend’s StumbleUpon account to surf through their preferences. In a way, it’s TiVo 2.0, helping make the vast stretches of the internet easier to digest by telling you what you like. This method of maintaining pre-established interests is detrimental to personal growth and discovery, since users are continually exposed to the same division of information. This allows the account holder to simply stay in their comfortable “box” of interests and never branch out into new, exciting, potentially enlightening information. If someone wants to spend the whole day reading articles about a political issue, StumbleUpon will provide an endless supply of articles with a similar skew that the reader had previously preferred. There is nothing mentally stimulating or challenging about finding information in this way, seeing as the finder isn’t even doing the finding himself. In turn, the mind cannot create new and creative connections to information, since all the information provided is already intertwined for the reader. 

Easily accessed and connected information like this has a significant consequence: reduced memory. As stated in The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (2010), the internet has taken over as our new memory. There isn’t a need to remember details of an issue, or anything for that matter, when it can easily be retrieved online with negligible effort (pg. 180-184). The mind now forgets much more quickly than in the era before websites like StumbleUpon, which is certainly not a positive side effect.  All in all, this website is simply a tool for laziness and unimaginative discovery.