I just read a news item about Nicholas Carr shutting off his Facebook and Twitter accounts and not carrying a smartphone because of how they affect our minds. He believes that our “intellectual technologies” encourage some ways of thinking while discouraging others. The computer, he says, “encourages the division of attention, distraction, and multitasking.” This leads to less deep reading and contemplation.
Carr is the author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2nd-floor Browsing Books Collection, QP360 .C3667 2010) as well as an article Is Google Making Us Stupid? that appeared in Atlantic magazine. The article was the subject of a Library blog entry in 2008!
Please ask a librarian if you are interested in finding additional material on this topic.
