Is the Internet Making Us Stupider?

Is the Internet making us stupider? I posited this today during a class lecture and held the Internet responsible for my total inability to focus on anything longer than 140 characters (okay, exaggeration. Twitters wishes). I even had Nicholas Carr back me up. Read the Atlantic article that first posed the question here, his recent WSJ journal article here or about his new book on the subject here.

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.

Ms. Greenfield concluded that "every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others." Our growing use of screen-based media, she said, has strengthened visual-spatial intelligence, which can improve the ability to do jobs that involve keeping track of lots of simultaneous signals, like air traffic control. But that has been accompanied by "new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes," including "abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking, and imagination." We're becoming, in a word, shallower.

Everything he says is relatable: after 5 minutes of continuously reading a single article, I found myself reaching for a new tab almost reflexively.

Then a very reliable source told me I was DEAD WRONG. (And hinted that it might be my own diagnosed learning handicap??) Studies show that the Web in our day and age is actually boosting our literacy. Students are more likely to be writing, at length, in non-school related subjects and promoting dialogue among their peers. If the depth of our knowledge may be suffering, it is making it up in breadth. Today's definition of intelligence emphasizes more the ability to find a fact rather than knowing it anyway, which is now a completely effortless endeavor. And doesn't every generation always think the next is a total moron?

MEANWHILE: In addition to learning about the current state of things and shaking hands with various cool people (omg EIC of spin, founder of high times, editorial director of glamour.com!), we talk a lot about the future. Because everything is different now. Branding, electronic paper, apps, you name it, are all essential parts of the new magazine’s survival. Holy crap, there’s even talk about ionized air particles streaming content out of nowhere. Far out, dude!