"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"(Britannica Forum: Your Brain Onlin. In his cover article in the July/August issue of the The Atlantic Monthly (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?
“), Nicholas Carr raises what for some will be an alarming prospect: that we may soon face the end of reading, the end of thinking, and the end of culture as we have known them for hundreds of years, thanks to the Internet and the dramatic ways in which it is reshaping the way we learn, interact, and express ourselves. He begins with a personal reflection: “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. Unnamed. The Reality Club: ON "IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID" By Nicholas Ca. This latest tiff (e.g.
Shirky-Sanger) seems to boil down to another of Robert Wright's zero-sum dichotomies—like the hoary left-right political axis, or the "choice" we are all-too frequently offered, between safety and freedom. Simplistic tradeoffs ought to raise our hackles.