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not make us smarter and probably will make us more stupid in the sense of being reliant on crude, generalised approximations of truth and information finding. Where the questions are easy, Google will therefore help; where the questions are complex, we will flounder.” —Matthew Allen, director of Internet Studies at the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts, Curtin University of Technology, and critic of social uses and cultural meanings of the Internet

“The challenge is in separating that wheat from the chaff, as it always has been with any other source of mass information, which has been the case all the way back to ancient institutions like libraries. Those users (of Google, cable TV, or libraries) who can do so efficiently will beat the odds, becoming ‘smarter’ and making better choices. However, the unfortunately majority will continue to remain, as Carr says, stupid.” —Chris Saunders, managing editor, InternetNews.com

“The Internet as a connector will continue to make humans as a group more intelligent and better informed, resulting in better life and social decisions. It facilitates ideas being shared by people who may otherwise never meet. Having said that, the Internet will also foster stupidity in some sectors through misinformation among those who don’t know how to evaluate the goodness of information, and may end up as bad as TV, as a passive source of commercial influence.” —Dan Ness, principal analyst, MetaFacts

“The problem with Google that is lurking just under the clean design home page is the ‘tragedy of the commons’: the link quality seems to go down every year. The link quality may actually not be going down but the signal-to-noise is getting worse as commercial schemes lead to more and more junk links.” —Glenn Edens, technology strategy consultant, formerly senior vice president and director of Sun Microsystems Laboratories, chief scientist at HP, president AT&T Strategic Ventures

“If ‘Google’ is a metaphor for a globally accessible archive and mirror of human life (thought, knowledge, behavior, etc.), then I think it’s enhancing human intelligence by making knowledge accessible in a way that it can be built on collaboratively all over the globe with exponentially lower barriers to participation