A thought provoking article written by the venerable Nicholas Carr in July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly explores how the Internet and by connection Google is changing human cognition:

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

After reading the article I know exactly what he is talking about. While I consider myself a true netizen and advocate for all of the positive aspects of the net, I am also an scholar, educator and parent and can’t help but wonder what the long term implications of the cognitive rewiring that’s going on. It seems innocent enough; it begins with adapting the way we read which in turn impacts the way we think. Over a long enough period of time this could have pretty significant consequences. I’m not about to give up the medium that I have grown so dependent on and proficient with, but it really makes you wonder if we are really programming the Internet or if it actually programming us. Something to think about.

Read the whole article here: Is Google Making Us Stupid?