Is The Internet Making Us Stupid?

Nicholas Carr makes some very interesting arguments here that have me pulling in two directions. In a way I feel that this internet is making us more uneducated and in another way I feel that the internet is opening our minds to whole new dimensions that we would have never thought to look at before. In my first thought I feel that the internet is giving us a way to obtain information without much effort and no need to read through chapters and chapters of a chemistry or biology book to obtain the answers we need. Like Carr says “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” I completely agree with this statement that he makes. I don’t know how many times I have just browsed through an internet page not understand words or sentences and just looking for that key word or answer at the end of the article. On my second thought I feel that the internet can make us way more brilliant than ever before if we use it the right way. The vast amounts of material and data that can be found on the internet always leaves me curious and wanting to read more. I have found myself numerous times 15 or 20 minutes into reading an article that has nothing to do with what I was looking for in the first. I simply read the article because it fascinated and left me wanting more and more information about the topic. I believe that the internet can be a brilliant or disastrous tool, it just depends on the way you use it.