Opinions from individual experts and institutions were sought after tech scholar Nicholas Carr claimed that the ease of online searching and distractions of browsing were constraining his ability to concentrate.

Another expert Jamais Cascio, a senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies, made a counter-argument that even while the technology and media proliferation might challenge our concentration capacity, there were enough signs to suggest we’re in the process of developing the ability to see meaning in confusion as well as solve new problems, irrespective of acquired knowledge. He felt that tools to help assess information smartly would be developed over time.

Here is the response of different experts to the debate:
Nicholas Carr himself stated, “I feel compelled to of course, agree with myself. I would add that merely average IQ scores wouldn’t be enough to measure the Internet’s effect on the peoples’ intellectual lives. The Net shifts the emphasis of intelligence – away from what can be termed a contemplative or meditative intelligence and moving more toward a utilitarian intelligence.”

Peter Norvig, Google Research Director responded: “Google indeed thrives on understanding data. However, making sense of it (both for Google as well as for its users) is not just like building the very same artifact over and over just on an assembly line. It rather requires creativity plus a mix of deep and broad knowledge. That’s what Google tries to facilitate.”

Paul Jones, ibiblio, North Carolina University, Chapel Hill, noted: “Google lets us become more creative in terms of approaching various problems and be more integrative in our thoughts. We thus spend much less time in just trying to recall and greater time generating actual solutions.”

The vice president of Association of Internet Researchers, Alex Halavais, felt: “Google sure will make ‘intelligence’ different. Just holding information easily discoverable on it will not be a mark of intelligence any longer, but a sideshow act! Ability to effectively and quickly discover data and try to solve problems, rather than do it ‘in your head’, would be the metric that we use.”