Does the increasing trend of ADHD-ness make us more stupid?

This post was inspired by an article, found on The Atlantic through Lifehacker.

While I would agree to some degree (heh, it rhymes) that the wide availability of information makes people accept information more readily and with less critical analysis involved, I don't think it astute to blame it on Google or the Internet.

While we have increased our average lifespan approximately twofold in the past few centuries, the things we try to achieve in a single lifetime have increased... what, a hundredfold? two-hundredfold? I think a natural result of this would be less time spent on each item, and consequently less focus per achievement as well.

In the past people had fewer career choices and fewer sources of information, and definitely much less spam. I somehow doubt they even have enough outlets to achieve the kind of ADHD behaviour we exhibit today, be it in front of the television or interacting with the Internet. Today, just sifting out irrelevant information alone already saps enough energy from some of us, let's not even talk about focusing on the myriad things that require our attention.

In other words, I think this is a natural and inevitable result of the greater availability of information, and also in the choices available to us when it comes to spending our time. The tradeoff for having more things to do, and being able to do more things, is less time to spend on each thing.

This monologue is going to end here, because something else is dragging my attention away and I'm not really interested in the topic to go dig up references, statistics and facts to support my points. But if someone has an interesting point of view I would be glad to respond and further develop this.