A journalist who writes about technology and society is going to spend much of his waking time basting in the electronic juices of the Internet. Maybe American teens do text too much, but not everyone is a tech jockey who lines up at the Apple store for the latest Steve Jobs dream gadget. What about the guy who drives a delivery truck, the lady who sells you stamps at the post office, the mechanic, the farmer, the factory-floor worker, the insurance salesman, the homeless guy at the local public library? They may have computer access, but they are not all leading lives bathed in the glow of an iPad or a BlackBerry. And there are office workers who still read books -- just look around you on the Metro.
Beyond the borders of the developed world, cell phones may now be more or less ubiquitous, but Internet access is not -- at least not yet. So when Carr talks about a new modern brain whose neural landscape is being dramatically reshaped by all our time online, he's not really talking about all or even most of humanity but about a relatively elite segment of the planet's population.