Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr is a great extension of my earlier post, which ended with a reviewer's assertion that there are no mentors for the proper use of new technology. (As in yesterday's nytimes: "You can’t exactly say to your teenager, 'When I was a boy, I didn’t have an unlimited texting plan until I was in high school.'") Carr suggests that accessibility, searchability and connectedness are rewiring our brains to thrive (fast!) on surface information, while maybe diminishing our capacity for deep and sustained thinking... My argument (and demonstration) is that we can use connectivity and speed to help us actually synthesize massive amounts of information (similar to Max Boot's point, via Ross Douthat), which reminded me of a line from Contingency, irony, and solidarity about "placing" books and figures in the context of others, and by doing so, "we revise our opinions of both the old and the new." The web lets us "place" (i.e. link) more effectively than ever, but I'm afraid that through the new machine-spontaneaity, unless our thinking keeps up, we will more often misplace the best of the old, along with, as Mark Edmundson pointed out, what's most valuable in education.