Internet technology has recently created dramatic changes in our society and the world. I say recently because at any time the exponential gains are so monumental that the past becomes nearly insignificant in comparison. The average person has access to more information now than professionals had 10 years ago.

My wife treated cancer patients for years as a radiation therapist in Bellingham and several Seattle hospitals. When her sister was diagnosed with Stage II B, Multi-Centric, Infiltrating, Ductile Carcinoma, High Grade Boon-Richardson, Score 8 ER-, PR+(1%), Her2-, Breast Cancer, using the internet my wife was able to access all of the critical information to help her sister understand exactly what the diagnosis meant. Every section plays an important role in understanding the diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and survivability of the condition. 10 years ago, without today’s internet search engines, this information was not possible for her to access.

There may be a downside to the advantages we’re seeing with easy access to nearly limitless information. Nicholas Carr, in the July/August 2008 Atlantic wrote an article Is Google Making Us Stupid? (What the Internet is doing to our brains), where he comments, “My mind isn’t going-so far as I can tell-but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.” His conclusion, “I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.” “…what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.”

I believe the changes in the way my thinking has changed over the years is partially due to a growing exposure to internet surfing, searching, exploring, and discovering. I also have to admit, while I have become a skimmer of information, and I am spoiled by the easy access and effortless changes of focus on the internet, quite simply stated, I have an aging brain that will not think the way I used to think. I haven’t noticed any changes in the way I read, beside the fact I seem to have less time to read, which I believe is a choice, a change in priorities.

Carr was far from starting the debate when he posed the question, Is Google Making Us Stupid? This article was merely a continuation of articles and books he has written about how the Internet is changing us. He has written a new book, The Shallows (What the Internet is doing to our brains) expanding on Is Google Making Us Stupid? That asks the question, “are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?” This new book explains how the Net is rerouting our neural pathways, replacing the subtle mind of the book reader with the distracted mind of the screen watcher. It is expected in June 2010.

I think, as time passes, our culture is slowly changing and devoting less time to activities such as reading books. With everything being faster paced, cell phones, texting, and internet, time is seldom devoted to introspection, reflection, paying close attention, or focusing. Depth of intellect is built with these personal attributes as a foundation. I still think deeply, always questioning, giving room for depth to exist in my daily life. I believe that growth does not require destruction of the past to make room for the future. I only have the present, the past brought me here and the future takes me forward, both existing inside of me as my depth, history and hope.

The internet is simply a tool. Used properly it has advantages, used improperly it can be harmful. I could spend hours in my garage entertaining myself with tools and never accomplish anything, then return the following day and again, never show any useful progress. I could use power tools to create wonderful projects in high volume for weeks on end, but where is the craftsmanship of a handmade project? Is something being lost when I use power tools to replace hand work? I think so. I accept that there will always be change, transition, and growth. The question then is, can we control the direction or intensity of the changes in a universally agreed upon positive direction? With the Internet, the changes are happening too fast to control, and with the direction being universally agreed upon, the answer is no, it will not happen.

I rejected the belief that the internet was changing the way we think until I read recent statements from Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, “I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something, and I worry that we’re losing that.” “The one thing that I do worry about is the question of ‘deep reading.' As the world looks to these instantaneous devices ... you spend less time reading all forms of literature, books, magazines and so forth. That probably has an effect on cognition, probably has an effect on reading."

24 centuries ago Plato has Socrates discussing a belief that people would, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful”, and they would, “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant” as they came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads. When Socrates and Phaedrus discuss how the great orators of the past had written down the successful tools of speechmaking, starting with the "Preamble" and the "Statement Facts" and ending with the "Recapitulation", Socrates says that the fabric seems a little threadbare. He compares someone with only knowledge of these tools to a doctor knowing how to raise and lower a body's temperature but not knowing when it is good or bad to do so. He states that one who has simply read a book or came across some potions knows nothing of the art of healing.

Knowing where to find the answers does not impart knowledge. Finding answers is not the same as finding truth. Truth is revealed through a depth of understanding. Knowledge is achieved through a depth of learning. Having knowledge and truth, judgment and principles, is called wisdom. In providing a limitless database of information, we may be losing the necessary foundation to ever achieve wisdom.