More from Michiko Kakutani

Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and email, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter.

More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they're increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show, or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite—never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it's our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven't been properly vetted and sourced.

People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work. Online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.

Technology is turning us into a water-cooler culture, with millions of people sending each other (via email, text messages, tweets, YouTube links) gossip, rumors, and the sort of amusing-weird-entertaining anecdotes and photographs they might once have shared with pals over a coffee break.

And, in an effort to collect valuable eyeballs and clicks, media outlets are increasingly pandering to that impulse—often at the expense of hard news.

"I have the theory that news is not driven not by editors who know anything," the comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently observed. "I think it's driven by people who are" slacking off at work and "surfing the Internet." He added, "It's like a county run by 'America's Funniest Home Videos.'"