[tigerthink]

Your brain makes you good at the things you do. So if the internet really is the best way to get the information you're looking for, it makes sense to practice internet surfing instead of book reading.

That said, it still makes sense to make web surfing easier if that's possible. This Firefox extension looks promising:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4111/

There's definitely a lot of crap on the internet, so I'm thinking of doing something like skimming Hacker News at the end of each day, emailing important and content-rich articles to myself to read in the morning. It seems relatively safe to indulge in this distractable mindset right before I'm going to sleep, during which my mind will presumably be reset to its default state. And by browsing the web in different modes at consistently different times of the day, classical conditioning will be on my side. It'd be interesting to play with other ways of using classical conditioning for this. For example, always wear certain clothing or eat certain food during one type of web browsing.