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

They've gone head-to-head on this now: an interesting representation of the "Wikipedia vs Britannica" debate.

David Weinberer is author of Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. "We're very good at organizing things in the real world ... But ... we always have to follow two basic principles: Everything has to go somewhere, and no thing can be in more than one place. That's just how reality works. But in the digital world we're freed from those restrictions."

Andrew Keen is author of The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture and, as you'll see, says himself he is "a disgraceful fascist luddite communist control freak monarchist failed dotcom entrepreneur".

Tags: information literacy, Digital immigrants, Digital natives

The video of the UCLA tasering incident made available on YouTube (not for the squeamish - you’ve been warned) raises a number of interesting questions. Lauren Weinstein paints this incident in a bigger picture, and, in a short, wonderful note on the subject, reminds us that our critical thinking skills are more important than ever. And a nice little article in The Atlantic on the unexpected consequences of everyone having a camera with them all of the time by James Fallows. Finally, take a look at some state-of-the-art digital photo manipulation looks like from research on content-aware image sizing presented at SIGGRAPH 2007.

This seems to be a good place to add mention of this unusual piece on fantasy football and information literacy ("National Librarian Sport Declared").

Tags: information literacy, cell phone cameras

“In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?” Eight minutes well worth your time. This isn’t very new, but it’s pretty staggering how things have evolved. A sideways commentary begins Michael Hirchorn’s article in the December 2006 Atlantic Monthly entitled “Get Me Rewrite!”

Tags: information literacy

BusinessWeek’s article, Cheating - Or Postmodern Learning?, provides a novel defense against cheating that underscores the continuing and increasing complexity of assessing individual ability in a collaborative context.

Tags: information literacy, intellectual dishonest