The other day I did something that I rarely do; I re-read an article. It was from 2008, a piece by Nicolas Carr from The Atlantic entitled ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ and it took a look at some of the effects that the proliferation of content across the Internet are having on our brains.

Of course, the easy answer is no, Google is not making us stupid. The Internet and, in particular, search, gives us almost immediate access to vast seas of information. It connects us with the collective knowledge of the world and allows us to be immeasurably more efficient than if were were left on our own to scour for the answers in a library.

Few would argue that the technologies brought to us by the Internet have benefited humanity in more ways than they’ve harmed it, but Carr’s concern is not so much to do with accessibility as it is with process.

He compares today’s Internet-obsessed, caffeine driven culture to a jet skier, skimming only the surface of knowledge where we were once scuba divers, engaged and immersed in deep thinking. Online, we are able to absorb only so much before something distracts us and urges us onward.

I’m sure most of us have noticed this. The Internet, with it’s endless supply of content, links and flash have made us a less attentive society, but it also seems to have jaded us, as we rely on our smart-phones and laptops to be the keepers of a knowledge we once stored in our heads.

Over the last few months I’ve noticed that my memory isn’t as sharp as it used to be. I’ve trouble recalling things like places and names that I clearly should remember (the word ‘verbal’ escaped me recently as I tried to argue that a particular TV show helped to improve children’s verbal skills). Because of this, I’ve become what you might call ‘a concerned citizen,’ trying to figure out what all of this technology is doing to us and to our ability to think.

The simplest conclusion one might draw from Carr’s argument is that, in the future, people will no longer be able to focus long enough to complete an entire novel and the New York Times will simply be a collection a blurbs, no longer than a few sentences, with content spanning the entire world. We will know a little about everything, and a lot about nothing. And that future may be here sooner than Carr anticipated.

When the article was published back in 2008, e-readers had just hit the market market, the iPad was still about two years away, and few would have predicted just how quickly these technologies would suffocate the world of the printed word (a world that had stubbornly refused to become antiquated since Gutenberg).

Though I’ve positioned myself as a sort of Luddite-technologist (one who does not see technology as inherently evil, but is skeptical of how society is coming to depend on it), tablet computers, which I have little practical use for, have seduced me to the point of nearly pre-ordering one of Amazon’s Kindle Fires.

For now, in an effort to retain what’s left of the cognitive capacities I nurtured through 17 years of schooling, I’m still able to escape the digital reach and finish a novel or read a magazine cover-to-cover. But if I do end up buying an e-reader or tablet, then I’ll inevitably make the transition from print to digital, and the entire world will once again be at my fingertips.

That’s not to say that people are incapable of finishing a novel on a tablet, but if Carr is right, and our brains do evolve into devices that subsist by jumping from one thing to the next - if we do become skimmers, incapable of stopping for a moment to absorb very much of anything - then it will become increasingly difficult to do.

My worry is that even those of us who want to escape the noise and clutter of the digital age by hunkering down and sinking thoughtfully into story will no longer have the capabilities to do so. And, if this is any evidence to that point, Carr has a book out which expounds on the ideas presented in the Atlantic piece called The Shallows. I was able to make it about two thirds of the way through before becoming disengaged and deciding to read the article instead.

I’m still battling, though. After all, the act of re-reading Carr’s article was geared, not so much towards re-familiarizing myself with with his claims, but as a way to prove to myself that I still could.