Two Men Don't Make an Argument

Quite frankly, I think they're both wrong.  Any time you decide that you're opinion swings to the extreme of any spectrum, it seems almost inevitable that you're really just going to make yourself look silly.  And while one of our authors (Carr) thinks that excessive internet usage is going to cause this:

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/the-day-after-tomorrow.jpg

and the other (Shirky) seems to think that mastering the detailed facets of the World Wide Web is the precursor to this:

http://emergingyouth.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/led20zeppelin20stairway20to20heaven.jpg

the reality is this:

Young adults sit around with juice boxes and kittens and look at pictures of...well...kittens.  

Both authors are partially correct.  The increased use of the internet in our world today has fundamentally altered the ways in which we operate.  However, neither of them had it quite right.  While Carr took the negative approach and decided that (about halfway down the eleventybillion lines of text) it is in the "economic interest [of companies] to drive us to distraction."  Based on this, he has decided that since we are now distracted, we are useless.  Or at least, we will be.

On the other hand, Shirky has decided that since the newly formed Intertube resources have given today's youth (doomed though we may be, in Carr's world) the outlet that we need to become the truly upstanding citizens it'll take to save humanity from itself.  While each new wave of technology in the past has done nothing short of exacerbate the dirty little nooks of the world it came into (Scat porn, anybody?) this wave will be different.  This wave will give us freedom.  It'll give us a new life.  It'll change everything.

Except it won't.  They're wrong.  The incoming information we deal with on the internet is, in fact, different from anything that's happened before, it's not going to turn us into a generation of concentration-deficient robots.  Also, the accessibility of blogging sites isn't going to form a massive influx of Hemingways and Prousts.  

Instead, it's going to serve multiple moderate purposes.  It will make it easier to write for those of us who wish to do so.  It will make it easy to access information quickly, in snippets that are easily digested.  And finally, it will become a part of our lives that is so innate and reflexive that we will have adapted to these things, and they'll fall into our patterns of behavior where we need them.