Is the Internet Scrambling Our Brains?

I am currently reading The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, which contains some very interesting arguments. As people have come to criticize or praise the internet, they usually base their arguments on the content transferred rather than the medium of information itself. According to Carr, the stance that it is the use of the medium that counts "is the numb stance of the technological idiot." The content of the medium, in other words the internet, is simply "the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind." We should be much less concerned with content and much more concerned with the effect the internet has had on our minds and the way we think.

Carr describes that the fast-pace information flow provided by the internet has warped his mind in a way he could not have foreseen. He can no longer read long articles, much less whole books. He merely skims for information before rushing onto the next hyperlink. He can no longer focus on anything for longer than a couple minutes. He describes this frightening process and his discovery of the issue. 

"At first I'd figured that the problem was a symptom of middle-age mind rot. But my brain, I realized, wasn't just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it--and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check e-mail, click links, do some Googling. I wanted to be connected...the Internet, I sensed, was turning me into something like a high-speed data processing machine...I missed my old brain."


So is the internet changing our minds? I personally have found it harder to focus than I used to, especially with long books. I have no patience for reading long articles when I am looking for information in my research. Newspapers have become useless. Why would I read a series of articles when I can look at a news feed as I sign onto my Yahoo account? However, I still love to read novels, so I do not think I am nearly as bad as Carr claims to be. I think most of us can say we are in this realm, but should we be afraid of having our minds scrambled by the internet? I think that as long as we still read novels and take the time to ponder while we read information, we can be safe from this disease. However, I think we should still spread caution about this issue because sadly, reading has become more and more obsolete as summaries are becoming readily available for nearly every work. Spark notes have saved many high school students from reading novels in class. To be honest, people just are not patient enough to sit through reading 200 pages anymore. I never realized how much the internet has changed us, and frankly, this scares me.