Is The Web Changing The Way We Think?

Nicholas Carr has written a significant article that explores how the internet and search technology is changing the ways we think and process information. He believes that the medium of the internet, with its inherent speed and impetus to continuously jump around, is actually rewiring our brains. Carr argues that because of the omnipresence of technology, the ability to focus and deeply engage with long form content is atrophying. In its place is a new cognitive style that mirrors the hyperactive nature of the internet itself.

Carr explains:

“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. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. 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.”

The Atlantic: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”