Is Google Making Us Stupid?

In this July/August 2008 Atlantic cover essay, Nicholas Carr describes a personal and professional sense that heavy internet use, especially search engines, was changing how he read and thought, making sustained concentration on long texts harder even as information-gathering became easier. He cites early commentary from other writers and researchers noticing a similar shift toward skimming rather than deep reading, and situates the internet within a history of technologies, such as the clock and the printing press, that reshaped human thought in ways society recognized only gradually. The essay is explicitly personal and speculative rather than a research report, and it became the seed for Carr's later book The Shallows. TechKids Foundation includes it as the original, influential public statement of the attention-and-reading concern this library's evidence base returns to.

REPORT A PROBLEM WITH THIS ENTRY