Annotate the following article, "Is google making us stupid" by Nicholas Carr (Please note that this is an English Language question).

Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop,Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with theimplacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous andweirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick s 2001:A Spaee Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, forlornly. "1can feel it. I can feel it."I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had anunconiforUible sense that someone, or something, has beentinkering viith my brain, remapping the neural circuitry,reprogramming the menior\'. My mind isn't goingso faras I can tellbut it's changing. I'm not thinking the way1 used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm read-ing. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case any-more. Now my concentration often starts to drift after tw oor three pages. 1 get fidgety, lose the thread, begin lookingfor something else to do. I feel as if I'm always draggingmy wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading thatused to come natur;Uly has become a struggle.I think I know what's going on. For more than a decadenow, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching andsurfmg and sometimes adding to the great databases ofthe Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as awriter. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes.A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks,:md I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote 1 was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be for agingin the Web's info-thicketsreading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimeslikened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works;they propel you toward them.)For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information thatflows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. Theadvantages of ha\ing immediate access to such an incred-ibly rich store of information are many, and they've beenwadely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recallof silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written,"can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that booncomes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive chan-nels of information. They supply the stutf of thought, buttbey also shape the process of thought. And what theNet seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity forconcentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly mo\'ing stream of particles. Once I was a scubadiver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubleswith reading to friends and acquaintancesliterary t}'pes,most of themmany say they're having similar experi-ences. The more they use the Web, the more they haveto fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Someof the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning thephenomenon. Scott Karp, who vnites a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. "I was a lit major in college, and used tobe [a] voracious book reader," he wrote. "What happened?"He speculates on the answer: "What if I do all my read-ing on the web not so much because the way I read haschanged, i.e. I'm just seeking c'onvenience, but becausethe way I THINK has changed?"Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the useof computers in medicine, also has described how theInternet has altered his mental habits. "I now have almosttotally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish articleon the web or in print," he wrote earlier this year.