Referred to as Digital Natives, today’s generation, born and raised in the internet age, have become accustomed to surfing the web swiftly, developing a desire for media in bytes and snacks as opposed to full meals. In fact, reading through a full-length article has become something of the past, and while immersing oneself in a book or extensive work used to be easy, that’s rarely the case anymore. Instead, fully submerged within the online world, our minds now expect to take in information the way the Internet dispenses it: in a rapidly rolling stream of fragments.

But it would be wrong to say this transformation was unforeseeable. In fact, media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s the idea that the mediums in which we immerse ourselves are more than simply passive channels of information—they not only supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is whittling away our capacity for concentration and contemplation— “deleting” our ability to take part in any sense of deep reading, for that matter.

Instead, in a world of digital consumption, we now spend our time “power browsing,” speeding horizontally through titles, phrases and bold terms, looking for a quick win. To know what is going on in the world today means you have scrolled through your news feed, or glanced quickly at the latest social media post. Whether it be reading a short comment of a friend ranting about the latest news on Facebook, or a 140 character Tweet, today’s generation wants their information—and they want it now.

In fact, this phenomenon is not limited to merely news, but to the way we accumulate any sense of knowledge. While in the past, “research” meant spending hours at the library reading through numerous books, today we rely on a machine to do the work for us. Effortlessly clicking through pages of search engines, we look for bold terms to pop out and provide us with instantaneous “knowledge.” A few Google searches, some quick clicks and in just a few minutes, we’ve got exactly what we need. With the Internet promoting a style that puts efficiency and immediacy above all else, the concept of deep reading intertwined within the field Journalism is drowning in our networked waters as we speak.

The truth is that the deep reading and allure of long prose that emerged with the early development of printing press, has since been replaced with brief snippets in the age of the Internet. With this change comes the change in the structure of journalism.

Today the likelihood of a student getting a job as a reporter writing long assignments is slim to none, and that has as much to do with economic realities as with technological innovation and the attenuation of our attention spans. If the economics of the web prefer quickly consumable trivialities, future journalists will be producing exactly that. If eight seconds is too long to wait for a page to load, then reading an extensive, heavily reported article will take light years; in time, this practice will dissolve altogether.

In a world where immediacy trumps quality, and the ability to concentrate is at an all time low, journalists will soon be creating content to fit the needs of their consumers– eventually producing nothing but quick, easily digestible snippets of information.