A realist as well as an idealist, Spiegel is well aware of the cons as well as the pros of our present digitally saturated society. “[W]hen I was young,” she recalls, “You had a great deal of time to focus on what was happening in your mind and information could proliferate, amplify itself, and take form in your imagination without that much interruption from outside. … Our culture is at this point full of people who are focused outward and are processing incoming material all the time. Would somebody feel a desire to hear a certain kind of thing and go looking for it? Would they hear something inside their head and want to hear it in sound? It seems that people are fending off a great deal now. The dominant process is overload compensation: how can I rule out things that I don’t want to focus on so that I can ingest a manageable amount of information and really be involved in it. Information used to be the scarce commodity. Attention is now the scarce commodity.”