It depends on how you use the web, and how you define “smarter.”
The internet was abuzz this summer over Nicholas Carr‘s eloquent argument in The Atlantic that the internet is eroding our ability to read long and complex texts (if you agree, but can’t make it through to the end of his 4,200-word essay, chalk it up to confirmation bias).
Now, a new study finds that skilled, thoughtful web surfing can actually build cognitive skills and may delay the onset of dementia in older users.
The findings of the study, by U.C.L.A. memory specialist Gary Small, do not necessarily refute Carr’s argument.
Small’s team found that experienced web users experience increased stimulation in the regions of their brains that handle complex reasoning and decision making. The activity was more widespread than when the same subjects were reading a book, or when inexperienced web users surfed the internet.
In other words, being able to tease out useful information from all the chaff on the internet can be as intellectually demanding a task as completing a crossword puzzle.
But is puzzle solving the same kind of “smartness” as the “smartness” that comes from reading a book?
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Sure, web surfing is active and engaging, and it probably exercises the decision-making part of the brain. But it has also decreased our attention spans to one-minute-or-less. If I am reading an essay nowadays, especially on a computer screen, I find that restlessness sets in far too early.
I find that reading on the internet has encouraged me to read more off the net. Heck, I found Freakonomics on the net, and have amassed quite a pile of recommended reading from the bloggers and comments here.
I agree with this. The only way I got through four years of reading lengthy and complex PDFs of academic essays during college was to download them all, and then turn off my wireless internet to prevent distraction.
I think web surfing causes more À la carte reading vs. long essays. This is because it allows you to explore information, content, and references instantly. When you read an essay in a book, how often you do go get the references and read them too? Essays on the web just have a link to a reference and often do not devote hundreds of words to paraphrasing the reference. I think web essays tend to be more succinct as a result of that and as a result of people wanting more focused thought.
Think of something like a new law being discussed: how many people read all 100 pages? Most of us always have relied on newspapers and other news media to summarize it. Now, we can get many different summaries with different opinions attached – that is more how people see web information access.
This blog is a good example: you have a few hundred words on something and link to the deeper article, study, essay, or set of such. This allows someone to choose how far to drill down based on their interest.
The pre-web equivalent was magazines like Scientific American – shorter pithier articles summarizing massive amounts of detailed information produced for and by those who are in that specialty.
Like Gary said, I also found Freakonomics on the net and I also have read a lot on the net from mainly forums. Now I am pretty young but very interested in economics and politics, so the net really has helped it would seem by having many dedicated forums on the subject. It’s very hard to talk to your friends about subjects which they probably don’t know much about, and so forums are great for reading something new and being able to communicate with others that are also interested in that certain subject. I also wish to add that I believe that my writing skills have also greatly increased due to “forum-ing” although I wouldn’t call myself a good writer.
Not mentioned is the exposure to a much much wider variety of styles and, frankly, quality. I often don’t read all the way through much of the web, not because of any attention deficit, but because a lot more of it is bad, even maddeningly bad. Some of it is repetitive, also.
it’s not the internet that makes us ‘dumber’, but the sort of things we use it for that do.
now a lot of people are used to using the internet for social networking, chat, and other such activities that require short attention span. And little else. And so it’s little wonder that whenever they log on to the Net they have short attention spans – they are used to using Internet tools for short spans of time.
Whereas, there are also people who are used to using the Net for reading, for discovering new papers and articles, for downloading free ebooks… the Net has helped such people thrive.
It’s not the fault of the Internet that the latter is in a minority.
It really depends. One thing that I noticed: With some years of using the web, I have managed to get information way quicker. Since there is so much information out there, I’ve trained myself to filter out important information way faster than I used to, just getting the main information without really reading the text (I can read it thoroughly if it seems interesting anyway).
I also found out that, while it’s easy for me to get distracted by clicking links that lead me to referenced materials, and clicking links there again, it’s also easy to refocus on the original material once I’ve closed all the other browser tabs.
However, I can easily get distracted when working on a computer. Sometimes I am so comitted to the stuff that I’m doing that it starts to get automated and I even forget about to eat. That’s rare, though, much more often I find myself switching program windows and surfing yet another site on the internet. That’s why I like to read longer texts as hardcopy or on a platform where switching is not that easy (my mobile phone, for example, although that’s not quite as comfortable).