• Wired, Wednesday, January 5, 2011 2 PM

Amid a tsunami of tweets, texts, and status updates, popular wisdom holds that technology must be shortening our attention spans and shrinking our brains. On the contrary, Wired writer Clive Thompson argues all this communication, though fragmented, is inspiring an explosion of deep thinking and meditative analysis. "It used to be that only traditional media, like magazines or documentaries or books, delivered the long take," Thompson writes. "But now, some of the most in-depth stuff I read comes from academics or businesspeople penning big blog essays, Dexter fans writing 5,000-word exegeses of the show, and nonprofits like the Pew Charitable Trusts producing exhaustively researched reports on American life."

Search-driven technology also extends the lifespan of long-form analysis, as Thompson notes: "Back in the '90s, my magazine articles vanished after the issue left the newsstand. But now that the pieces are online, readers email me every week saying they've stumbled upon something years old." In Thompson's estimation, it's mid-form mediums like weekly wrap-ups (Newsweek, Time) that are actually suffering the most amid changing consumption habits. Just don't tell that to Tina Brown.

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