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That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. Students' minds have been wandering since the dawn of education. But until recently—so the worry goes—students at least knew when they had checked out. A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has.

Carr draws extensively from cognitive neuroscience literature to make his deterministic argument that the Internet is changing who we are. He weaves the findings together well, but on closer inspection, his use of the literature is occasionally questionable and at times outright indefensible. He seems to ignore the scientific literature that has actually found that new digital technologies might be better for how we learn (Gardner, 2006) and how we socialize (Pew, 2010). Furthermore, in his discussion of hypertext and the ways it hurts deep thinking, he draws from a Canadian study (Landow & Delaney, 2001) that, as Rosenberg (2010) argues, does not prove Carr's argument. The study was actually analyzing a specific type of hypertext fiction and was never meant to be extended to all hypertext. This example is a microcosm of Carr's book as a whole, a valid argument that extends itself too far.

Both Carr and Lanier provide inflammatory arguments about the Internet that will surely anger some readers. The strengths of these books are their ability to question widely held beliefs of digital evangelism and to make their criticisms accessible to mainstream audiences (though Gadget occasionally may get too technical for some). As we discussed above, the books do have their problems, but they may still prove valuable in an undergraduate course or any introduction to media criticism. Students would be able to read accessible accounts questioning widely accepted orthodoxy, and they would also be able to evaluate areas where each author takes his argument further than evidence allows.

his experimental study suggests that students who IM while reading will perform as well but take longer to complete the task than those who do not IM while reading or those students who IM before reading.

Articles are encouraged that explore theory, research, and practice—both practical and innovative technology applications