A new article in The Atlantic claims that Google is making us stupid. The article doesn’t blame only Google, of course. Rather, it believes the World Wide Web, TV and movies are dumbing down humanity. We are actually reading more than in the 1970’s, but instead of novels and newspapers, we are consuming snippets of information from a myriad of Web sites. The article claims we are becoming a society of Internet zombies.
The Net seems to be “chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”