The words are almost absurdly provocative: "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" reads the title Atlantic Monthly has used to draw attention — successfully — to Nicholas Carr's new article.

Yes, you suppose, it may be, especially after you read a headline like that on a piece that's a lot more thought-provoking.

But if you've ever had the feeling Carr writes about, you know that he is on to something. The Internet just might be rewiring us, luring us with its seemingly limitless flow of data, then shattering our attention spans into a hundred little shards, turning us from readers into gleaners, from writers, metaphorically speaking, into bloggers.

That feeling? You used to be a voracious reader but now you skitter along the surface of a page, ready to be distracted by a light bulb going off in another room or the thought that you need to TiVo a show that airs next week.

You used to be able to focus at work for hours at a stretch, but now you can't finish a short piece like this one without going downstairs for coffee, checking to see if a credit-card charge was reversed or looking at half a dozen blogs to see what's the very latest in the world of topics you never used to care about.

Carr, 49, the author of "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google," also first began noticing it while reading .

"Even a book I knew was very interesting, I'd find it very hard to stay engaged with reading," he said. "I did draw at least a hypothesis that my inability to concentrate was related to the time I spent on the Internet because the sensation I was feeling was very similar to what is my normal mode of taking in information online."

The piece, at theatlantic.com, has been controversial online, in part because answering a question the article proper doesn't ask — "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" — is perfect fodder for a "don't-be-ridiculous" blog post.

And Carr doesn't claim to have a research-vetted answer yet, only the hunch of a man who has studied and written about the way people's modes of thinking have been altered in the past — by new concepts of time, by the alphabet, by the printing press.

"I don't think 'stupid' is the right word," he said. "I see the article as more being about how the Internet may be changing the way we think, in a way that to me seems like a loss of something that has been important ... our capacity for contemplation."