I assigned Nicholas Carr's book to one of my classes (so I had to read it, of course). Carr argues that the brain shapes itself to our dominant media activities, which, these days, is skimming stuff on the Internet, tweeting, and messaging. In the end, he says, we're making ourselves unfit to read anything much longer than 140 characters. (Congrats if you made it this far; you might still be a "traditional" reader.) —Robert Dardenne, professor at USF-St. Petersburg
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2011.