In Nicholas Carr’s 2008 article for The Atlantic titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he presents the argument that the meteoric rise of the Internet has sapped the collective attention span of the human race, negatively impacting the way people find and ingest information, as well as how deeply they engage with their chosen material. While the title of the article is an oversimplification, Carr quite effectively posits that the overwhelming availability of information provided to the world by the Web strains one’s ability to concentrate on any one piece for too long. He relates the decline of his own attention span when it comes to reading, stating that he used to “spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose,” but now finds that his “concentration starts to drift after two or three pages.” Continue reading →