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Carr's argument is scientific rather than moral. The internet, he argues, has been "tinkering" with our brains. It is eroding our ability to concentrate and contemplate intellectually, the mental requisites that allow us to read and digest books. Instead of readers, the digital revolution is transforming all of us into skimmers - highly skilled at mentally jumping from hypertext to hypertext link, but increasingly unable to digest long or complex textual information, particularly in book form. Quoting the Tufts University developmental psychologist and leading authority on the act of reading, Maryanne Wolf, Carr reminds us we are not only "what we read" but also "how we read".

Thus, today's skimming generation is becoming more mentally superficial, unable to think in anything beyond the intellectually impoverishing currency of instant messages, emails, and short web posts. The historical consequences of Carr's observations are deeply worrying. In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, the Boston Globe columnist Maggie Jackson suggests that the increasingly low attention span and poor cognitive skills of today's multi - tasking, digitally addicted kids threatens to return civilisation to another dark age, one of what she calls "shadows and fears".

Through the continual use of digital products, specifically the internet, our brains are starting to work differently. "It is eroding our ability to concentrate and contemplate intellectually, the mental requisites that allow us to read and digest books" (Andrew keen). Society has gotten so accustomed to information instantaneously that formal eduction is expected in the same fashion. Students are becoming less dependent on reading books and more dependent on browsing the internet.