Design and usability guru Donald Norman makes a distinction between knowledge in the head and knowledge in the world – the notion being that rather than remember every detail about how the world around us works, we rely to a far greater degree than we realize on external sources of knowledge in order to make our way. The most obvious examples of knowledge in the world are books and such, where the knowledge is explicitly encoded in language. A subtler example that we notice mainly when it breaks down would be the orientation of handles and push bars on doors – horizontally oriented bars on doors implicitly “tell” the user to push them to open the door, while vertically oriented handles “tell” the user to pull.
Anyway, the Web has certainly made it possible for me to access in a very short time huge gobs of information that would have been much less readily accessible to me ten years ago. There are lots of things that I no longer bother to try to remember, because I can look them up with so little effort. In one sense, then, I’m “less intelligent”, because I carry around less knowledge in my head than before. In another sense, I’m “more intelligent”, because I’m functionally able to access and use vastly more knowledge than before, even if much of it is “in the world” rather than “in my head”. Some would regard this as indication of mental atrophy on my part. They might be right, but I believe that I function better mentally when my mind is focused on the things it’s uniquely good at – recognizing or creating connections between seemingly disparate concepts, finding unique and compelling ways to make use of those connections, and communicating effectively to others about those connections – and is less occupied with the effort of remembering a whole lot of stuff.
An argument might be made that, faced with a sudden deprivation of technology, I’ll be stupider than I’d have been without the web. Possibly. But if that contingency should occur, I’m likely to be facing very different sorts of challenges than I face now, and I imagine I’ll still be relying heavily on information in the world, just not encoded into language the way I do now.
Finally, there’s also a case to be made that even if the Web may actually be making individual persons less intelligent, it’s making “people”, collectively considered, more intelligent by providing for connections between people and information that would never have been possible a decade ago.