Is Google Making Us Stupid?

A recent article in the July/August 2008 issue of the Atlantic Monthly raises an interesting question for educators. Nicholas Carr asks Is Google Making Us Stupid? and he concludes that the internet may be changing the way we read and think. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who spends time around students. He writes,

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….For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind….And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Here’s the full article, if you have the attention span to finish it.

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