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the majority of experiments that have looked directly at the effects of the internet, video games and online social networking have actually found significant cognitive benefits. Video games improve visual attention and memory, Facebook users have more friends (in real life, too) and preliminary evidence suggests that surfing the web "engages a greater extent of neural circuitry...[than] reading text pages."

Now these studies are all imperfect and provisional. (For one thing, it's not easy to play with Google while lying still in a brain scanner.) But they certainly don't support the hypothesis that the internet, as Carr writes, is turning us into "mere signal-processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory."

Some 25 years after first moving to New York himself with an undergraduate degree in fine arts from Yale University and the hope of making it in theater design, Mr. Shirky has emerged, somewhat improbably, as the leading voice of New York's new school of technological pragmatism.

On June 10, Penguin Press will publish his latest book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. It's a wide-ranging essay about how the emerging forms of the Internet will ultimately provide a net benefit for society, in part by helping to free us all from our decades-long habit of over-medicating with television.

Most of us adjust to this situation more-or-less unconsciously and in an ad hoc way: we might be reading something online and think, I need to print this out; or we might just have an inarticulate feeling that we'd rather read a particular book on paper rather than on a Kindle. But I think teachers are going to have to be more conscious of these matters and adjust their strategies for teaching attentive reading accordingly. Last semester, for the first time, I had students reading some of their assigned books on Kindles, and next summer, when I will be leading a summer study tour of England, I plan to put every text that I can on my Kindle so I don't have to schlep a big pile of books around the island for six weeks. Within a year or two I expect to have a much better handle on how to deal with these changes.

“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists. She and other researchers compare the lure of digital stimulation less to that of drugs and alcohol than to food and sex, which are essential but counterproductive in excess.

Technology use can benefit the brain in some ways, researchers say. Imaging studies show the brains of Internet users become more efficient at finding information. And players of some video games develop better visual acuity.

More broadly, cellphones and computers have transformed life. They let people escape their cubicles and work anywhere. They shrink distances and handle countless mundane tasks, freeing up time for more exciting pursuits.

Carr’s argument also breaks down when it comes to idle Web surfing. A 2009 study by neuroscientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that performing Google searches led to increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, at least when compared with reading a “book-like text.” Interestingly, this brain area underlies the precise talents, like selective attention and deliberate analysis, that Carr says have vanished in the age of the Internet. Google, in other words, isn’t making us stupid — it’s exercising the very mental muscles that make us smarter.

This doesn’t mean that the rise of the Internet won’t lead to loss of important mental talents; every technology comes with trade-offs. Look, for instance, at literacy itself: when children learn to decode letters, they usurp large chunks of the visual cortex previously devoted to object recognition. The end result is that literate humans are less able to “read” the details of the natural world.

Despite its Department of Defense origins, the matrixed, hyperlinked Internet was both cause and effect of the libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley. The open-source mentality, in theory if not always in practice, proved useful for the tech and Internet worlds. Facebook and Twitter achieved massive scale quickly by creating an open system accessible to outside developers, though that openness is at times more about branding than anything else—as Twitter’s fellow travelers are now finding out. Mainframe behemoths like IBM wave the bloody shirt of Linux, the nonprofit open-source competitor of Microsoft Windows, any time they need to prove their bona fides to the tech community. Ironically, only the “old” entertainment and media industries, it seems, took open and free literally, striving to prove that they were fit for the digital era’s freewheeling information/entertainment bazaar by making their most expensively produced products available for free on the Internet. As a result, they undermined in little more than a decade a value proposition they had spent more than a century building up.

Since I scaffold my sequences of writing assignments so that smaller papers serve to build up to larger papers, I do not comment on the smaller ones myself — although they do undergo the peer review process described above and are included in the midterm and final collected-works portfolio. (This is a method advocated by John Bean in his influential book Engaging Ideas, for all teachers of writing.) Instead, once students have written the larger paper (usually three per term) I meet with each writing group in person. We all sit around the computer screen and read each person’s paper and supply interactive commentary. Usually I write in the notes and commentary for the students. But sometimes, depending, I’ll have students write the notes and commentary themselves. I end up spending about the same amount of time per paper as I would commenting in isolation.

Markey then created his own model...and used it to help predict the effects of violent video games in a sample of 118 teenagers. Each participant played a violent or a non-violent video game and had his or her hostility levels assessed. The teenagers who were highly neurotic, less agreeable and less conscientious tended to be most adversely affected by violent video games, whereas participants who did not possess these personality characteristics were either unaffected or only slightly negatively affected by violent video games.

At the same time, Obama's job approval rating fell to 48 percent. This isn't really news, though. Studies have shown that the biggest factor in a president's rating is economic performance. Connecting the minute blip in the polls with Obama's reluctance to emote or alleged failure to send enough boom to the Gulf is, frankly, absurd.

Democrats have also slipped in their standing among "independent voters." That phrase, by the way, is meaningless. Voters may self-identify as "independent" but in almost all cases they lean toward one party.