Every new technology or invention is always seen as a human achievement. Be it locomotives, air planes or computers – every innovation has made people more connected, informed and educated. At the same time a debate is now taking place about the role of computers. (particular internet) on our minds. This debate is more focused on the minds of youngsters amongst us who have opened their eyes seeing their parents using Internet over laptops, mobile phones and other hand held gadgets. Arguments such as by the writer Nicholas Carr suggest that with rapid availability of World Wide Web, our ability to concentrate is diminishing. And this is something to worry about as this is not just a habitual outcome but may in fact have for reaching impact on the actual neurological structure of the brain. All neuroscientists do not agree with this radical outcome, but this remains a fact that most of the people who remember spending hours reading long articles and books cannot do so easily today. Looking back, it is evident that the era of printing brought with itself an entirely different experience where people of this world for the first time got an opportunity to immerse themselves in reading of lengthy prose engaging their brains in contemplation and concentration resulting in developing meaningful retention, understanding comprehension leading to developing enhanced ability to reconstruct and connect different areas of knowledge. Not so long ago, reading classic fiction and no-fiction informative books was a norm and is still seen as a pride. But with the advent or rather onslaught of Internet, people often find themselves loosing interest just too soon as length of a ‘document’ goes beyond say half a dozen of pages. How many of us would recall reading something that was over 6 pages long in one go recently? Indeed, very few would – not even students do that anymore. This happens because we are now well trained to make meaning out of distractions and at times in fact look for distractions as concentrating on one idea or thought for over a few minutes appears to be boring to many. Take for example the TV which is now a collection of news items and constant tickers rolling over at the bottom (like status bar in computer!) all the time. Teenagers find themselves perfectly fine multitasking with a laptop, messaging over phone, conversing in person with people sitting around and watching these tickers all at the same time. Perhaps this is an uphill task for those who were not brought up in the age of this rapid information. And that’s exactly what make arguments of Carr more interesting what we humans are now going through a phase similar to the transformation from pre-print era to books-era that enriched human brain with knowledge and fired up new neurological development as brain practiced learning. Now this sudden explosion of Internet enabled devices has brought our brains at crossroads of another era where we are developing new capabilities and according to some, risk unlearning of some of our holder habits which might still as well be useful. This evolution is not yet complete but in a transition phase as numerous tools and services have been introduced precisely for the purpose of organizing information overload. These aggregations tools are so large in number that these have themselves become distractions of sorts. For example, search engine are means to get to the required information but they display ads, paid links, and large number of results and links to item being search – all this has a tendency to drift the information seeker to spend hours and hours only shifting through the long list of available information. This would be something like a library where a reader has so many books under a given topic that the temptation to acquire knowledge about the particular topic is overshadowed by the urge to peek inside the overwhelmingly large number of books available. And since time is finite, availability of choices make it difficult to cross the fine line between the time to be allocated for search and time for actual reading of required material. That’s where the idea of abridged knowledge comes in. Technologies such as audio books, summaries of books, short articles, abstracts of research papers etc serve the purpose of delivering required knowledge within time which is already constrained by same gadgets and technologies which are meant to save time such as emails, news feeds, test messages, TV programs etc. Also, this paradox of choice gives rise what is called social wisdom – the idea that collective knowledge can be relied upon instead of one information can be relied upon instead of one information seeker doing all the hard work of sifting through mammoth knowledge-base that Internet has now become. Many of us would rather click and watch a video link posted by a friend on a social networking site rather than trying out figure out our won themes of interest and searching for relevant videos on You Tube. This idea of sharing has given rise to social networking as to beat the myriad of date. Same theory is at work behind sites such as social bookmarking, referral based online discounts, automated suggestions of what type of music one might want to listen and what kind of books might be of interest etc. There’s no rocket science behind all this but simple an analysis of what other humans are doing out there, for example people who purchased a particular book also purchased some other specific ones, and also browsed some other ones. But caution needs to prevail in letting collective wisdom take over in all scenarios, for example there’s a growing tendency amongst students to rely just too much on Google search where results are shown not necessarily in terms of accuracy but according to an algorithm where popularity has a major contributing factor which implies what’s more popular ought to be accurate as well which might not be true in every case. Same is the issue with Wikipedia as academic institutions at times restrict references from this public knowledge site in their assignments.

Given all the access to information that Internet provides at fingertips, there is growing need to bring in discourse the impact this will ultimately have on human intelligence and brain. Since there’s no denying to the fact that technology is the future, the solution will also ultimately appear from technology itself as tools of information organization become more mature over decades or even centuries just as print media has settled in our lives and we have only praise for our books instead of fears of it tempering with our brain neurons.