The Internet is making our brains different... but not worse.

By Suzanne Choney

msnbc.com

updated 7 minutes ago

A decade from now, Google won't make us "stupid," the Internet may make us more literate in a different kind of way and efforts to protect individual anonymity will be even more difficult to achieve, according to many of the experts surveyed for a look at "The Future of the Internet" in 2020.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center asked nearly 895 technology "stakeholders and critics" about their expectations for the Internet 10 years from now. Among those queried: representatives from the Institute for the Future, Association of Internet Researchers, professors, Internet law and privacy experts, Internet pioneers and those in the business world.

One of the questions they were asked was whether Google, in some ways is a metaphor for the ease of information on the Internet, "will make people stupid" because of society's over-reliance on the search engine and the Web for everything from addresses to easily copied school reports to "Googling" prospective suitors or employees.

The notion was addressed in a 2008 story for The Atlantic titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by author Nicholas Carr....

Story continues: msnbc.msn.com

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