Is Google Making us Stupid?

This article - Is Google Making us Stupid - has been receiving a fair bit of attention. The author states: “My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.”

The concept of reduced attention span has drawn criticism. Mind Hacks states: “In terms of any new technology, it’s obvious having tools to hand changes the strategies we use to solve problems, but so far, there is no strong evidence that Google, YouTube, Facebook or any other part of the web affects the fundamentals of how we think.”

While the evidence supporting the idea that we think differently due to technology use may not exist, anecdotal seems to trump empirical for most people…