[Web4lib] "Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains"

[Michael]

Good paper for good discussion, as we are seeing on other library-related
lists. I ran across this similar piece on the current infozeitgist from the
"Washington Post":

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/12/AR2008061202258.html?referrer=emailarticle

Brief excerpt:
The Fate of The Sentence: Is the Writing On the Wall?

The demise of orderly writing: signs everywhere.

One recent report, young Americans don't write well.

In a survey, Internet language -- abbreviated wds, :) and txt msging --
seeping into academic writing.

But above all, what really scares a lot of scholars: the impending death of
the English sentence.

Librarian of Congress James
Billington<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/James+Billington?tid=informline>,
for one. "I see creeping inarticulateness," he says, and the demise of the
basic component of human communication: the sentence.
-- 
Michael aka DrWeb
drweb2 at gmail.com

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 4:05 PM, B.G. Sloan <bgsloan2 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> Here's a new article that might be of interest:
>
> Carr, Nicholas. Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to
> our brains. The Atlantic, 301(6), July/August 2008.
> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
>
> An excerpt:
>
> "For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online,
> searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the
> Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once
> required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done
> in minutes...what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for
> concentration and contemplation...Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of
> words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
>
> Bernie Sloan
> Sora Associates
>