Remember the kerfuffle over "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The 2008 cover story in The Atlantic by Nicholas Carr contended that the barrage of information available on the Web is changing our brains, making us all shallow and deficient in our attention span. It also raised a ruckus across the blogosphere with Web users who didn't like to be called "stupid." Now, as if to challenge our cultural ADD, Carr has expanded that article into a book: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. In book reviewers, Carr finds a friendlier audience to his "more books and less Internet" thesis. The Boston Globe is impressed with the argument, if unimpressed with drawing out the argument to such a great length:
Carr’s argument rests on just three chapters (out of ten). He lays out, first, what we now know about the adult brain’s malleability, or “plasticity,’’ and then ...
