Is Google Making Us Stupid? asks Nicholas Carr in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Carr dances around the question so in the hand we don’t know whether he is just being provocative or whether he really believes it.

The fact that it begins and ends with a doomsday scenario of computers taking over the world suggests perhaps he really believes it. A key premise is surely right: as we obtain new technologies for expressing ourselves and consuming content from others our brains adapt.

I am dubious that there was much of a real break when we went from the quill to the pencil to the typewriter or even to the PC but there surely was when we went from the oral tradition to writing. It is much more plausible that the link-based structure of the web leads to a change in expression and communication though the evidence Carr reports seems a bit thin—it is based on studying library internet logs but doesn’t track what people did later; the bopping around and linkages that people do on the web sounds an awful lot like people used to do in the library stacks.

I have two conjectures: one is that the nonlinear expression and communication made possible by web technologies is making us smarter in being able to learn and express ourselves; and that we are at such an early stage of this new technology (think 10 years after the invention of the quill pen) that we have only a glimmer of its possibilities in expression and learning.