The advantages of having immediate access to the incredibly rich store of information on the internet are many, but they come at a price, states Nicholas Carr at Atlantic.com: the internet is changing our way of thinking.

In his article, Carr shows how internet not only changes our way of reading. It goes a lot deeper than this: it changes our way of thinking too. He illustrates this with personal experiences of himself and others, with quotes from writers, philosophers, neurologists, psychologists and brain scientists.

"As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

Some of Carr's crucial quotes are from Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain". She states we are loosing our ability to deep reading and therefore, deep thinking:"In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.".........."If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with 'content', we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture."

Carr also shows how technological progress has always generated skepticism, worrywarts and doomsayers, so we should be skeptical of his skepticism...... "Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine."

You may not agree with Carr, but he managed to write an interesting and challenging read again: Is google making us stupid?.