I recommend reading the entire article...
I think we had a similar story/thread in the past, but I couldn't find it. This issue is of critical importance. Imagine trying to explain the dynamics of deep politics, the environmental crisis, or the subtleties of our own to psychology to the Twitter/Facebook generation. The outlook is not good.
This stuff definitely affects me. I'm often distracted online and jump from one idea or task to another. Staying focused can seem like a chore. Like most people, I can find myself clicking, reloading, and reading the most insignificant crap, almost unconsciously.
I'm glad that I can remember a time when having a computer was something kind of nerdy and special. I did my first papers on an electric typewriter/word processor. We didn't have cell phones and nobody had ever heard of the web. But people 10 years younger probably barely remember anything before the web.
Marshall McLuhan talks about how new media technologies can overpower us unless we remain independent and consciously use them for our benefit. It's true, and we may be headed for some Terminator style showdown unless this whole Collapse thing happens pretty soon.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_...
Back in the 1980s, when schools began investing heavily in computers, there was much enthusiasm about the apparent advantages of digital documents over paper ones. Many educators were convinced that introducing hyperlinks into text displayed on monitors would be a boon to learning. Hypertext would strengthen critical thinking, the argument went, by enabling students to switch easily between different viewpoints. Freed from the lockstep reading demanded by printed pages, readers would make all sorts of new intellectual connections between diverse works. The hyperlink would be a technology of liberation.
By the end of the decade, the enthusiasm was turning to skepticism. Research was painting a fuller, very different picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext. Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics—evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats—that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension. A 1989 study showed that readers tended just to click around aimlessly when reading something that included hypertext links to other selected pieces of information. A 1990 experiment revealed that some “could not remember what they had and had not read.â€
There’s nothing wrong with absorbing information quickly and in bits and pieces. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the Net’s treasures, we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture.
What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting.