So asks Nicholas Carr in the cover article of the July/August Atlantic Monthly. I put this here not just because i't's an interesting and worthy read, but because it resonates with me, both the good and the bad. The good is how the technology has quite fundamentally changed my ability to write: I simply couldn't do what I do with pen and paper, though like many, I still like to print out an intermediate draft now and then to read through end-to-end (but that may be simply a lack of the right technology to enable the same ability). The bad is that I, too, have slowly, over a decade, gone from voracious book reader to being barely able to keep up with print publications like the Economist and Atlantic Monthly. Perhaps the glass-is-half-full explanation is just that my information consumption has actually gone up; it's just different. The article's mention of neurological rewiring echos Marc Prensky's thought in Digital natives, digital immigrants part 2.

On the other hand, I can't say I resonate with the glass-is-half-empty predictions of the article. Change of the sort described just is. If indeed it's a problem - and I don't think so - then the genie is already out of the bottle and all we can do is manage the effects. Wired Magazine's cover article The End of Science and two related articles, Tap Into the 12-Million-Teraflop Handheld Megacomputer and Supercomputing Power Hits the Desktop, Minus the Software, curiously speak in some way to this issue from a different perspective.

Tags: Google, information literacy, Digital immigrants, Digital natives