Literacy affecting physiology as well

Marshall McLuhan. the Gutenberg Galaxy.

McLuhan states that African children exposed to literacy become more active than non-literate children Born in Madagascar, who are more lethargic and are less likely to want to seek play. Those Madagascar children have a very long attention span and can sit listening to say, a story, for a considerable amount of time. 

If this cause and effect theory is true,  Maybe our shortening attention spans are indicative of our becoming even more intelligent. If true, I wonder if this increased smartness happens at the individual level, or do we merely adjust and align to be able to collect and share our intelligence with a bigger crowd. After all, it's suggested that the sharing of information is what causes this phenomena of shortening attention – when we know there will be others to deal with the information we can gather, do we 'push' more information than we can handle consciously into our subconscious?

The Internet offers information in such a quantity that we accept our inability to make sense of it alone. In the words of Homer Simpson 'can't someone else do it?'. Look at Wikipedia for answer - someone else could do it and there's a good chance they did it before you knew you needed it. 

You and me both contribute to the internet's content simply by browsing like some superorganism. But it's hard to make a true correlation between us and an ant colony. Maybe that's because we believe that ants are not intelligent as individuals, and that lacking intelligence and free will is a necessity for colony-like superorganisms to function. What  if ants just don't seem intelligent to us because they rely so heavily on their fellow ants. If the colony's collective intelligence reached a point where all of it's needs are met then maybe there is no need for the further development of the individual unit. Or maybe, as with evolution, the individual development is too slow to observe.