On the Wall Street Journal David Gelernter and  Eric Freeman discuss the evolution of how we consume the internet: 

We go to the Internet for many reasons, but most often to discover what’s new. We have had libraries for millennia, but never before have we had a crystal ball that can tell us what is happening everywhere right now. Nor have we ever had screens, from room-sized to wrist-sized, that can show us high-resolution, constantly flowing streams of information. 

Today, time-based structures, flowing data—in streams, feeds, blogs—increasingly dominate the Web. Flow has become the basic organizing principle of the cybersphere. The trend is widely understood, but its implications aren’t.

There is also the other side of the equation, not just consumption but production. Anyone working producing content to distribute on the internet is aware of how rapid this flow really is.