"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

In Nicholas Carr's essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" he starts off by talking about his own experience over the past few years with technology and how it has affected him. Carr brings his ideas of technology into play when he says that technology has been changing his brain and the way he thinks. Carr says he's not thinking the way he used to think and his concentration is scarce. He then goes on to bring in Clive Thompson and Marshall McLuhan; McLuhan backs up Carr by saying, "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."(para.3) Carr's essay contintues with strong evidence about the net chipping away concentration with qoutes from Scott Karp a blogger and Bruce Friedman another blogger who blogs about computers in medicine; they both have had trouble absorbing long bits of information and they also blame the net. Carr next talks about a published study of online research habits conducted by scholars from University College of London and they suggested that we may be in the midst of change in the way we read and think. Carr brings another idea to the table when he says "Thanks to the ubiquity of test on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice."(para.7) Is our generation becoming stupid or smarter? Carr doesn't specify yet; but he does continue with this idea that a communications system has never played so many roles in our lives or had such intense influence over our thoughts than the internet does today.