Internet = Stupidity?

Is the internet really making us stupid? There’s simply no way that the internet is making us stupid, I mean think about it with all the information at our fingertip that statement would be completely absurd. That’s what I thought before reading this article. However, Nicholas Carr has somehow convinced me that the internet is truly dumbing me down.
Nicholas shows us a very good observation in his article. The fact that a majority of us (readers) are finding it a lot harder to read papers online that are longer than three pages already shows that we have a short attention span and that we either can’t focus on the paper or mainly that we don’t want to translate what we are reading. As Nicholas has said “We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains” (3) this shows that reading does not come naturally (in the sense that it doesn’t take work) but reading actually racks our brain to work. With reading information on the internet we want just the bits and pieces that go to our answer, not the long drawn out paragraph. By wanting this we are not exercising our brains anymore and now can no longer easily translate long papers and essays. We can see that we are reading shorter and shorter things through a majority of the sites that we most commonly visit. Some of these examples include CNN, Google, and other various sites. When we visit these sites we are generally reading headings, or 3 paragraph articles, basically everything that is very short. By doing so, I feel like our brains our no longer making new brain connections, which in turn is causing us to be dumb.
Not only are we affected by what we read, but also by how we read. This is said in the sense that we now no longer have a strong desire to remember what we have read. Before writing on paper or on the internet was large, people had to remember everything that was told to them (stories and information). Now, however, we have the luxury of simply saying “let me look that up real fast”. When we say stuff like that we may have some desire to remember what we have read but not a strong enough one that puts it deep into our mind.
Saying that the internet makes us stupid may seem like an overstatement but it really is true. If we do not change our reading habits and how we use the internet I believe that our brains will deteriorate even further into nothing. Reading longer articles may seem pointless compared to reading key points, but without all of the fillers we would lose a lot of the details that we deem “unimportant”.