I think I can say with true sincerity that notpron, or at the very least the creator of notpron, likes Google. Google is massively important to make notpron’s clues work. Without it, an absurd knowledge of all things would be necessary to complete the riddle (rather than absurd critical thinking and deductive reasoning skills).
And notpron is rather clear about when Google should be used, as he provides a search bar in the levels that would require most people to use it. The first instance of this is in level 4.
Like level 6, completion of this riddle would take some intense prior knowledge of different types of coding. Level 4’s coding isn’t as obscure as the ascii in level 6, but the number of people in this generation who can decipher morse code without Google is not a statement about Google’s ability to reduce the intelligence capacity of a society.
Used how notpron intends its audience to, Google doesn’t make us stupid like Carr claims here, but it is encouraging us to let it make us smarter, as Kelly believes here.
Notpron is a new use of a relatively new medium, and it forces its players to use the popular search engine to further their knowledge and advance on their quest, not to give up on maintaining information for ourselves.
We can use the vast libraries of information, be it Google or Wikipedia or any other source of a profusion of things we don’t know, and we can better ourselves with it. Notpron simply reminds us that with Google, you don’t have to know everything, you just have to know how to learn what you don’t know.
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