‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ was the provocative title of a recent article in the US journal The Atlantic. Its author was Nicholas Carr, a prominent blogger and one of the internet’s more distinguished contrarians. ‘Over the past few years,’ he writes, ‘I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going – so far as I can tell – but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.’He feels this most strongly, he says, when he’s reading. ‘Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case any more. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/22/googlethemedia.internet