Another one for my pile – Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains is a book I'm looking forward to reading.

There are interesting reviews by Todd Gitlin and Christopher Caldwell which both make it clear that Carr's book – based on an Atlantic essay title Is Google Making Us Stupid? – is no mere rant. Caldwell says: “It is a patient and rewarding popularisation of some of the research
being done at the frontiers of brain science. Carr has lately found it
harder to concentrate on the serious reading he used to love. He is
taken aback by the number of smart people who no longer read books. He
puts the blame on the mental habits we have all learnt on the internet.” Gitlin calls it 'lucid' but adds: “Unfortunately Carr does not entertain the possibility of unexpected
gifts from the internet. He does not ask whether associational
thinking—thinking that leaps horizontally, connecting dots that
previously were segregated or “siloed”— might actually benefit from the
non-stop multitasking in which one’s center of consciousness is
constantly intruded upon by fragments of periphery.”

Although I'm not yet in a position to make up my own mind, I wonder also whether Carr – like others who decry the effect of new technology on serious thought – also both over-estimates the amount of serious linear thinking that used to go on before the internet and under-estimates the parallel effects of other aspects of technology. For example, Steven Johnson has some very interesting points about the way new software (DevonThink in his case) has allowed him to write his books in different and better ways.

As ever, getting the proper counterfactual is a tricky business.