Goebel Gone Global

I think that the website Twitter is a pretty good indication of the effects that the internet has on our brains. It moves us away from more focused reading by encouraging us to obtain snippets of information at a very rapid pace. Our brains become accustomed to acquiring information by quickly skimming and scanning, by sifting through links, and by searching through entire books to find the smallest fragments of relevant information. The downside is that in all this fast-paced info-gathering, we lose our ability to focus and to easily digest larger amounts of material; it gets to the point where sitting down and reading a three-hundred page book no longer appeals to us. Hence Twitter (and other microblogging sites), where readers can find what they are looking for without ever having to focus their attention for more than 140 characters at a time.