Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows" - Is the Internet Eating Your Brain?

It's hard to come to a single conclusion about Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows". It's interesting, it's accurate, in places it's obvious but at the end of the day it almost seems pointless. Here's the argument in a nutshell - recent developments in neuroscience have shown that the brain has immense plasticity and that it behaves something like a muscle - use certain parts and they get stronger, don't use certain parts and they get weaker. The nature of the Internet, with endless distractions and hyperlinking, dulls the brain's neural pathways (developed over an admittedly short period of time of near-universal literacy) that engage is deep reading and reflective thought. In Kahneman's phrase, it dulls System 2 thinking. Well, maybe. First, we do not know what the architecture of the Internet (and human interface) will be in 10 years, so it seems a stretch to make predictions on the long term effects of current Internet architecture. Second, dulling a neural pathway is not eliminating it, and people still  do (and hopefully will continue to ) spend time in the offline world where System 2 thinking has more of a chance to flourish.   Third, I have no truck with Carr's point on the reduced quality of our writing, the brain's inability to multitask (unless our neuroplasticity enables us to evolve to do so better)  or the poverty of e-communication as opposed to face to face communication. But those are social and educational issues more than technological ones, even if they are given a huge assist by technological means. Carr's point seems to be a form of McLuhanesque techno-neural determinism, that the Internet will shape our brain function. Maybe so, but so what? So will many other things, and we have yet to determine fully what we are gaining and losing, we're still in mid-path.  Carr's book is interesting and diverting, and it is not written in the breathless "the Internet is eating your brain" style prose of technophobes. But beware taking a photo of a moment in time and extrapolating from it  - I am reminded of the famous photo of a racehorse with all 4 feet off the ground. Looking at it in isolation, one might think that horses fly....