Writer Nicholas Carr has become well-known for bringing to light the impact that modern technology is having on our thinking and on our brains. In particular, he believes that the internet harming our ability to think deeply about things since we are constantly jumping from site to site, topic to topic. Carr wrote a cover story in Atlantic Magazine called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. He blogs at roughtype.com.

Carr also gave an insightful interview in The Sun Magazine, in which he stated:

I was having trouble sitting down and immersing myself in a book, something that used to be totally natural to me. When I read, my mind wanted to behave the way it behaves when I’m online: jumping from one piece of information to another, clicking on links, checking e-mail, and generally being distracted. I had a growing feeling that the Internet was programming me to do these things and pushing on me a certain mode of thinking: on the one hand, distracted; on the other hand, efficient and able to move quickly from one piece of information to another. In the article, I focused on Google because it’s the dominant presence on the Net — at least, when it comes to gathering information. It provides a window into how the Internet is imposing its own intellectual ethic on its users at both a technological and an economic level.

Because Google makes money based on how many ads we see and how often we click on them and jump to another page, it has a strong interest in getting us to move around the Web as quickly as possible. In some ways the nightmare scenario for a company like Google is that we slow down and spend a lot of time with one source of information.

Even aside from Internet business strategies, this tendency toward distraction is built into the Net through the use of hyperlinks and search engines, and I believe it’s beginning to influence not simply how we gather information but also how we think. …

(Read the full interview on The Sun Magazine’s official website.)