A huge attention span is the hallmark of genius.

The biographies of men like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla reveal that they were so fascinated by their experiments that they worked almost all day and all night in a state of fascinated excitement.

Conversely, a short attention span is a sign of stupidity.

Our world will never again see the essays of men like Henry David Thoreau, rich in metaphor, similes, and cascading rivers of prose.

It is moving too fast, and its events are being communicated to our bedazzled brain in sound bites and media blitz.

The internet itself, when it comes to the subject of literacy, is a huge paradox.

On one hand, the pace of technology causes the user to quickly grow weary of slow dial-ups and slow loading web pages, our nervous systems responding to 5 to 10 second pauses with the impatience of drivers stuck behind a red light.

On the other hand, the plethora of information, running to billions of web pages, with each search word literally offering a million or more possibilities on a search engine, is staggering.

The word