Stupid

Nicholas Carr wonders if Google is making us stupid.

I think his theme is that the instant info gratification provided by Google and the interwebs generally has decreased our attention span to point that we can't think deeply any more - but I didn't actually have the patience to read the whole article...

Over the past few years 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. I can feel it most strongly when I’m 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 anymore. 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.

So maybe we have become impatient with multi-thousand word essays with just one idea...though it seems that nobody seems to have actually studied the phenomenon he posits. He does add:

...So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism...