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.

Ahhhh … The Wall Street Journal. How I love your Saturday essays. I typically eat them up regardless of the topic, but the past two Saturday’s have featured a real treat for us techies. Nicholas Carr (the author or “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains”) has written on a topic that I find especially intriguing—the Internet and the surrounding question, “Does using the World Wide Web make us dumber?”

I mean, it stings me a bit to admit this (being a person who probably uses the Net for, oh, about 85% of her day. Really, I should be drooling in a cup right now), but the guy’s got a point. Yes, the Internet grants us access to copious amounts of information, but at a price. In exchange for the free entertainment, we need to put up with constant distractions (e.g., text filled with pretty links and icons, busy multimedia, email alerts, etc.) that actually lend to scattered and shallow thinking. Think about the focus you commit to reading a book or a printed version of the morning paper compared to your favorite Blog or Webcast. Are you part of the 95 percentile that uses the Internet when you’re juggling more than one task? It kinda sums up what the Roman thinker, Seneca, put so eloquently almost 2,000 years ago “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”

In your minds this a fair observation today? Or do you perhaps share in the belief of Patricia Greenfield, a developmental psychologist who pointed out that there are benefits to the divided attention that the Internet offers. For example, computer tasks and video games tend to enhance our visual literacy skills, part of our cognitive abilities, increasing the speed at which we shift focus, or as Greenfield so-scientifically puts it, “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” Now, I bet she reads a ton of print.

So what do you think? Does Internet use make us skimmers, shallow thinkers, dumb-dumbs? Or did I lose you back at “cognitive thinking”? If so, then I guess Carr is onto something here. But before I shut down my computer for good and go work in a used bookstore, we’ll look at the other side of the argument tomorrow with Carr’s “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?”

Stay tuned …