Technology and the Interrupted Brain

Does technology make us dumber or smarter? A slew of recent and soon-to-be-published books explores that question.

Enough already with the cute cat videos and the Twitter stream. Being a whiz at pulling facts from the cloud or mining a stream of Internet information can be useful, but that skill can become a bad habit that impedes real learning. This is the premise of Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Carr warns that the Internet is not only making