The internet helps people speed up there work and get thinks done faster, but do to this aid of thinking how is it affecting our Cognitive thinking

metime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to beprecise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting andpainful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that hewould soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once againflow from his mind to the page.But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change inthe style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you willthrough this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work,his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes partin the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine,writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’sprose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns,from rhetoric to telegram style.”

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socratesbemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as asubstitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of thedialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be ableto “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeablewhen they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

Maryanne Wolf, a developmentalpsychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of theReading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a stylethat puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deepreading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prosecommonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our abilityto interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction,remains largely disengaged

But a recentlypublished study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggeststhat we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-yearresearch program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popularresearch sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provideaccess to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using thesites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to anysource they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book beforethey would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence thatthey ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report: It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there aresigns that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontallythrough titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems thatthey go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense

"audience effect"

Professional writers have long described the way that the act of writing forces them to distill their vague notions into clear ideas. By putting half-formed thoughts on the page, we externalize them and are able to evaluate them much more objectively. This is why writ-ers often find that it's only when they start writing that they figure out what they want to say. Poets famously report this sensation. "I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind," Cecil Day-Lewis wrote of his poetic compositions. "If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it .... We do not write in order to be understood; we "\Vrite in order to understand."