In 2008, Nicholas Carr took to the pages of The Atlantic to make the provocative case that Google might be "making us stupid." His basic worry was that a reliance on the Web was rewiring his brain, that he was skimming along the surface of links, facts, and ideas, but now had trouble engaging in more focused thought and in reading longer pieces of text.

Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. 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. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Such worries have been commonplace over the last few years, but are they accurate? The Pew Internet & American Life project polled 895 Internet "experts"—including Nick Carr—to see what they thought of such doom-laden prophecies.

It turns out that the experts don't see much merit to the worries; more than three-quarters of the sample concluded that Carr was wrong.

Changed, but not for the worse?

This isn't to say that human intelligence isn't changing as people come to rely on the Web, however. Respondents were nearly unanimous in their view that tools like Google allow different parts of the brain to take prominence. Instead of seeing this as "bad," most respondents see it as merely "different"—one more long change on the continuum of human mental development, the next tech step after reading, writing, and the calculator.

Nick Carr. Carr sticks to his guns. It's not that IQ scores are going down, but that the change in mental activity promoted by long exposure to Google and the Web has real problems.

"What the 'Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking."

Peter Norvig. Google's Research Director, not surprisingly, defends the merits of skimming, saying that it sets the stage for more prolonged mental effort. As to whether people want to make that effort, it remains up to them.

"My conclusion is that when the only information on the topic is a handful of essays or books, the best strategy is to read these works with total concentration. But when you have access to thousands of articles, blogs, videos, and people with expertise on the topic, a good strategy is to skim first to get an overview. Skimming and concentrating can and should coexist."

Dean Bubley, wireless industry consultant, says that the Web is merely the extension of a process that has been going on for millennia: using technology to free up our minds for other tasks.

"I think that certain tasks will be 'offloaded' to Google or other Internet services rather than performed in the mind, especially remembering minor details. But really, that's a role that paper has taken over many centuries: did Gutenberg make us stupid?"

Andreas Kluth, a writer with The Economist, agrees. "This is the continuation ad infinitum of the process launched by abacuses and calculators: we have become more 'stupid' by losing our arithmetic skills but more intelligent at evaluating numbers."

Sandra Kelly of 3M says that whether "Google makes you stupid" or not is up to you. "I don't think having access to information can ever make anyone stupider. I don't think an adult IQ can be influenced much either way by reading anything and I would guess that smart people use the Internet for smart things and stupid people use it for stupid things in the same way that smart people read literature and stupid people read crap fiction."

Andrew Nachison, cofounder of We Media, argues that access to so much digital knowledge might be edging out other kinds of knowing, leaving us to drown in a sea of facts.

"It has confused and overwhelmed us with choices, and with sources that are not easily differentiated or verified. Perhaps it's even alienated us from the physical world itself—from knowledge and intelligence that comes from seeing, touching, hearing, breathing, and tasting life. From looking into someone's eyes and having them look back into ours. Perhaps it's made us impatient, or shortened our attention spans, or diminished our ability to understand long thoughts. It's enlightened anxiety. We know more than ever, and this makes us crazy."

The death of literature?

If the Internet changes the way that we think and process information, it must also have some effect on the way that we produce information. Sorry, fellow English majors—novels belong to the past.

Clay Shirky, a professor at NYU and a prolific author himself, says that over the next decade, "Long-form expressive fiction will suffer (though this suffering has been more or less constant since the invention of radio) while all numeric and graphic forms of rendering knowledge, from the creation and use of databases to all forms of visual display of data will be in a golden age, with ordinary nonfiction writing getting a modest boost. So, English majors lose, engineering wins, and what looks like an Up or Down question says more about the demographic of the answerer than any prediction of the future."

Kluth, of The Economist, agrees that people will read more "in terms of quantity, but more promiscuously and at shorter intervals and with less dedication. As these habits take root, they corrupt our willingness to commit to long texts, as found in books or essays... This will result in a resurgence of short-form texts and storytelling, in 'haiku culture' replacing 'book culture.'"

But will a culture oriented to short forms create non-ephemeral material? In other words, will we create classic literature this way?

Some are pessimistic. Gene Spafford of Purdue University sums up the objection: "Most writing online is devolving toward SMS and tweets that involve quick, throwaway notes with abbreviations and threaded references. This is not a form of lasting communication. In 2020 there is unlikely to be a list of classic tweets and blog posts that every student and educated citizen should have read."