We have entered a world where people are completely reliant on the Internet and social media. People cannot walk into a family home or even a restaurant without seeing one person not on a cell phone, computer, or tablet, talking, texting, or playing a game instead of interacting with each other. This generation's technology was made to ease communication skills, and over all make the world a "better " place. However, technology is not just used as a helper in communication but is now a substitution for boredom and a real social interaction. In Alan Greenblatt's "Impact of the Internet on Thinking: Is the Web Changing the Way We Think? " an UCLA psychiatrist suggests that: "'We have a generation of digital natives with very strong techno-skills and very strong neuro pathways for multitasking and experiencing partial continuous attention and other wonderful adaptive skills, [b]ut they're not developing the face-to-face human contact skills.' " (Greenblatt, 9) American's of the twenty first century have surrounded themselves with constant updated media and excessive amounts of Internet usage that has recently proved to have a negative impact on the human brain and behavior through: its affects on reading, distraction, memory, learning, and internet addiction.
The Internet has made researching and reading a universal medium: a faster and easier way of taking in information (Carr, 510). On the other hand, Nicholas Carr, a writer on technology and its effects on society has claimed that because of technology, he can feel his own mind changing the way it thinks and ends up affecting the way he reads. Carr states: "[M]y concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, [and] begin [to] look for something else to do . . . The deep reading that used to come so naturally has become a struggle. " (510) A media theorist Marshall McLuhan suggests that the Internet affects concentration, contemplation, and takes in the information as quickly as it is distributed (511).