'Slow web' movement offers calming technology alternatives

Back in the summer of 2008, the US writer Nicholas Carr published a now famous essay in The Atlantic magazine entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The more time he spent online, Carr reported, the more he experienced the sensation that something was eating away at his brain.

"I'm not thinking the way I used to think," he wrote. Increasingly, he'd sit down with a book, but then find himself unable to focus for more than two or three pages. "I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do," he wrote. "I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text."

Reading, he recalled, used to feel like scuba diving in a sea of words. But now "I zip along the surface like a guy on a jetski." He has since expanded his essay into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

In the half-decade since Carr's essay appeared, we've endured countless scare stories about the life-destroying effects of the internet, and by and large they've been debunked. No, the web probably isn't addictive in the sense that nicotine or heroin are. No, Facebook and Twitter aren't guilty of "killing conversation" or corroding real-life friendship or making children autistic. Yes, the internet is "changing our brains", but then so does everything and - contrary to the claims of one especially panicky Newsweek cover story - it certainly isn't "driving us mad". Yet that gnawing sense of mind-atrophy that Carr identified hasn't gone away, and just recently in Silicon Valley it's stopped being taboo to admit it.

"I would go into a room to get something, and by the time I got there I'd forget what I was looking for," said Alex Pang, a Stanford University technologist who'd barely turned 40 when he began to feel that life online was melting his brain. "For someone who had got through life on raw brainpower, this was unsustainable, and a little terrifying."