Contrary to the title of this article, Nicholas Carr isn’t so much asking if Google is making us stupid, but rather if Google making us think differently. The answer to this question is yes, and it echoes earlier sentiments by Neil Postman who pointed out (about television) that technology is not neutral:
Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
