This article worries me, to put it mildly. In it, Carr presents his case that the internet is causing him to loose his concentration. Where he gets this idea, I'm not quite sure. In fact, in his article, instead of trying to make some kind of hypothesis on the subject, he simply writes, "Yet for all that's been written on the Net, there's been little consideration of how, exactly, it's reprogramming us", and then starts a new paragraph about Frederick Winslow Taylor and stopwatches at a power plant. It seems to me that his difficulty with low attention span reading has affected his writing. The many sources in the article, and the author himself, are one of the things that worries me in the article. Why are they spending so much time on the computer? When this idea first popped into my head, my second thought was, "Ok, relax. Cut Carr some slack, he is an online journalist afterall". Then I went back into the article just to make sure I couldnt find something that could help me prove my first thought. Luckily, I found that he admits to "searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the internet". Well, with all that time looking at the computer screen, at what is mostly variations of junk, how could Carr's mind not start to get fuzzy? And besides, he tries to put the blame on someone else in the very title of his article, asking if it is Google who is doing this to "Us", when really it is him putting himself infront of the computer screen to surf and search.
Could the reason some people have trouble reading long online texts be because of that reason alone: that their online? Often times, and I've discussed this with members of my family, a text seems more real, more important, when you can hold it, feel the pages or the book. Once a text goes online, it's already much harder to read, because of the many distractions such as adds, and the little voice in the back of your head saying, "Go on Facebook". Not only that, but the screen can hurt your eyes, which of course makes reading long paragraphs online more difficult.
Another worry of mine was the Google creator's mention of a smarter-than-human artificial brain. The co-creator, Page, declares that if one were to have an artificial brain that was smarter than our own, we would be better off. This could possibly be the most worrying statement I read in the entire article. If the artificial brain was smarter than our natural one, how would we be able to control it? We would be forever stuck as programmed robots, working for a machine.
Now, I want to mention that when I took notes on this article, I wrote "Brave New World" in all- capital letters, and under lined it twice, when i got to the part about Taylor and the stopwatches. The similarities between Taylor's work and the novel were shocking. If the people in the New World were to not worship Ford, they could certainly worship Taylor, who worked for "maximum efficiency, and maximum output", just like the reproducing system in Brave New World. Also, he declared that "in the future, the system must be first". I wonder if Huxley was familiar with this Taylor character....

*By the way Mr. Fitz, when I wrote about the eye pain that comes from reading online for a long time, I thought of you and sympathized.