It's not yet available online, but the current issue of The Atlantic (The Ideas Issue!) offers the provocative cover question "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Writer Nicholas Carr worries that the tremendous amount of information made available on the Web—and the ease with which search engines like Google and Yahoo make that information obtainable—is somehow rewiring the way we read, process, and understand things. Carr takes note of a recent study of online research habits:

[S]cholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited "a form of skimming activity," hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited. They typically read no more than two pages of an article or book before they would "bounce" out to another site. Sometimes they'd save a long article, but there's no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.

It's a chilling, and, if personal experience is any indication, entirely accurate depiction of the way the Web reshapes our research and comprehension abilities. Can anything be done about it? It is necessarily a bad thing? I have no idea; the article is like five pages long. Who has time for that? It'll probably be online soon, you can make up your own mind about it then. If you remember to look for it. Which you won't. Let's be honest, if you've actually made it this far in this tiny post you're already looking at your watch and thinking about clicking elsewhere. We are all ADHD sufferers now.

UPDATE: The article is now available online.