Although I agree with Carr that the internet is making us impatient, I do not think that it's making us stupid. I think that the popularity of search engines shows that we are thirsty for knowledge that before would have before taken us too much time to find. For example, over the summer my Pre-Calc teacher assigned us review problems. For one of the problems I needed the quadratic formula. I had completely forgotten it so I used Google and I found it in about 5 seconds. The internet is great for things like looking up Latin declensions, a country’s capitol, or current events. I set my homepage to BBC.com and it’s a great way to get world news.
Like I’ve said, I agree that we are becoming more and more impatient. But I disagree with Carr that the best way to absorb information is reading from a book. I think that if I printed up an article about Russian society in the early 19th century I’d probably learn a lot more on that topic than I would from reading War and Peace.
I don’t think that the internet is lessening our intelligence, I think that it’s challenging us to read books even though there’s an easier way out there. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” In no way am I saying that books aren’t important. They give us a chance to explore a topic and really reflect on it. But the internet isn’t making us stupid, we are simply allowing it to make us lazy.