In yesterday’s post, I reflected on a Wall Street Journal essay by Nicholas Carr (author of “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains”) as he posed the question “Is the Internet Making Us Dumber?”

Well you’ve had exactly 24 hours to contemplate your side of the argument…maybe you even went home and did what any right-minded person in 2010 would do—you Googled more on the subject, posed the question to your Facebook friends and then Tweeted the results. So now I’d like to look at the other side of the argument, presented in a follow up essay by Clay Shirky (author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age), “Is the Internet Making Us Smarter?”

Shirky points out that amid the juvenile videos, cheap images and icons, rambling text (that just anyone can write), and don’t forget the spam … there’s little respect for the practices and standards of journalism or literary text. But does this give the old guard a right to point their (much less dexterous) fingers at the Internet, like it does generation after generation with every new media, with the accusation that it will be the downfall of our youth, or more plainly, “It’s making our kids a bunch of overweight dummies!”

Isn’t the most vial and commendable triumph of the Internet being overlooked here? After all, digital media has linked over a billion people into the same network, connecting our cognitive surplus (or as Shirky puts it, “the trillion hours of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about”). Bottom line: the Internet is responsible for some enormously positive social feats?

Take Wikipedia for example. It’s now the single most important English educational reference tool available—whether you want to believe it or not. Isn’t its very existence proof that the Internet and the social collaboration it encourages responsible for creating many remarkable educational and medical resources. Or are you apt to look at Wikipedia and cry “It’s a bunch of hooey! The information is all wrong!”?

It’s true that as a media grows, average quality drops—much the case with Wikipedia and the quality of online blogs and websites in general. But isn’t society smart enough to be the judge? I guess that’s the BIG question now isn’t it?

I encourage you to read the entirety of Shirky’s essay and share your thoughts.