There is a great debate raging all over the blogosphere, and more traditional media for that matter, in regards to the effect the Internet is having on the “wiring” of our brains, and more specifically our collective reading skills. We’ve recently written about it here, here, here, and here, Nicholas Carr had a great piece published in the Atlantic Monthly called “Is Google Making us Stupid“, Clay Shirky has an excellent response on the Britannica Blog entitled “Why Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr“, and a variety of other well thought out replies to Carr’s article can be found here.

Personally, I find that the quality of the debate itself runs somewhat counter to the thesis that Google, Digg, blogs, and other social media tools are making us stupider (or stoopider, if you prefer) – it’s pretty hard to read everything that I’ve linked to above and not come out feeling a little smarter for the time invested. However, such articles are by no means representative of what most people typically spend time reading online, so I certainly see value in the debate continuing to evolve – which is where this recent NY TImes piece comes in.

Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes (and I really like the first couple as thought starters in terms of how brains are being wired differently, in a way that could be construed as both good and bad):

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”

Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be. So like in the book somebody could die,” she continued, “but you could make it so that person doesn’t die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don’t like.” Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted “Dieing Isn’t Always Bad,” about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.

Elizabeth Birr Moje, a professor at the University of Michigan who led the study, said novel reading was similar to what schools demand already. But on the Internet, she said, students are developing new reading skills that are neither taught nor evaluated in school.

Though he also likes to read books (earlier this year he finished, and loved, “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand), Zachary craves interaction with fellow readers on the Internet. “The Web is more about a conversation,” he said. “Books are more one-way.” The kinds of skills Zachary has developed — locating information quickly and accurately, corroborating findings on multiple sites — may seem obvious to heavy Web users. But the skills can be cognitively demanding.

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.