Surface provider

In The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr asks, via Kubrick, McLuhan, Nietzsche, Turing and Google, exactly what the www is doing to our grey matter:

My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Although, as Carr points out, the magnificently named Hieronimo Squarciafico offered similarly gloomy prognostications about the long-term effects of Gutenberg's printing press on the 15th-century mind.