"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

"Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computer in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habit. "I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print," he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a "staccato" quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. "I can't read "War and Peace anymore," he admitted. "I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it." PG 60

I understand the points that Carr and Friedman are trying to make but I feel the problem is only for their generation. Our generation has been exposed to the internet for our whole lives so our brain is being programed to both read online and in text. Personally I find I have an easy time reading physical books than online texts. My attention span on the internet is less because of all the easily accessible distractions. While reading an article on the internet it is so easy to pull up Facebook or Twitter or etc. Whereas sitting quietly with a book away from the computer in a quiet place is far less distracting. I think that if anything is a result of the internet it is that our literacy rate as a nation has gone up. The Web is impossible to understand if you cannot read.