Is The Internet Making YOU Stupid ?

This has probably been mentioned here before, so my apologies for that, but I found this interesting - Is the internet making us stupid? | Internet Marketing News and Blog | E-consultancy.com

In partciular these sections -
"The internet has changed the way we consume and "process" information and thus has changed the way we think or, more appropriately, don't think"

""They found that people using the sites exhibited 'a form of skimming activity,' hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would 'bounce' out to another site. Sometimes they'd save a long article, but there's no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it."

I found this section quite apparent as the first time I cam to this article I scrolled through it, only reading bits here and there. This was one of the bits I did read .... oh the irony !

It reminded me of the way sometimes we are drawn to the highlighted or bold sections on a salespage, or the text placed inside a fancy graphic.


"Carr argues:

"The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.

"In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking." "

Would this then discourage the reading of an article or ebook, that we wish to study and learn from, onscreen. Would it be advised to print it off and read it this way ?

I could go on picking bits out of that article and making comments on it, but I wont bore you. It was very intresting reading though, let me know what you think !