Is Google Making Us Stupid?

The premise is reasonable and, I think basically true: "Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self." This draws on the insight of Marshall McLuhan that the tools we use extend our bodies and so our minds, our ways of thinking. Our tools enable some things and disable others. The trick for us in analysing culture is to learn to pay attention to both.
Now this article tends, imo, towards the glass-is-half-empty thing. While it does a nice little job of pointing out a few ways that artefacts have probably altered our thinking (and therefore the clustering of neural connections in our brains; thus our brains are literally shaped by our technologies), we aren't as fully reminded that the Jeremiads about new technologies have been a part of their births and infancies for a long time too: printing was maligned as the end of rigorous thinking because, and this was predicted rightly , it meant that no longer would people remember huge passages (and in so doing usually engage in depth with the arguments of the authors).
So we have this paragraph towards the end: "The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction."
Admittedly, the author owns that this is a downside-view, but I think we should also be looking for the upside-view that will enable us to see the equivalents of the many positives that writing and printing have brought to us.

You see, I don't see the widening of information vistas quite so negatively. I think that I can put this in terms suggested by the Myers-Briggs Type Analysis. One of the continua for human personality they work with is that between iNtuitive approaches to taking in data, and Sensing. The former is about big pictures the latter about detail. What I find happening is that I do indeed, as the experience of those mentioned in this article suggests, tend to skim more than I used to. But this suits me: I get wider pictures of things and then move into the details as I get a sense of what the big issues are. I'm wondering whether what is changing is that scholarship etc is moving from the age of the bottom-up synthesiser to the big-picture, algorithmic. From, the Sensers to the iNtuitives, perhaps even from the Introverts to the Extroverts aswell as connectedness is more fully enabled and valued.

Are the nay-sayings merely the bleats of the formerly artefact-advantaged as new artefacts help a different set of human traits to come to the fore?

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic
(July/August 2008):
Htt El Pais and The Edge