According to Adam: Are we that ADD?
While some so-called intellectuals have suggested that America, and society at large, is getting dumber, I don't think that's the case. We have access to more information than ever, and while there are some non-intelligent uses of it, I think as a whole we're a pretty bright group of people. 
That said, our attention spans are getting shorter, to the point that even gnats are like "dude, can you please focus for five seconds?"
In the recent years we've gone from newspapers to television to blogs to Twitter, where news is distributed in 140-character blocks, and moves so quickly that the site tracks popular topics by the minute.
Why do I bring up our lack of attention span (and given that lack of attention span, I wouldn't be surprised if you already clicked one of those shiny links to the right)? Well, because Sony has reportedly scrapped plans for a Sam Raimi-helmed "Spider-Man 4" in favor of rebooting the series. Seriously? A reboot? Of a series that debuted in the long-forgotten year of 2002? Is our attention span that short that we can remake a movie that isn't even a decade old?
This isn't just a Spider-Man thing either. Fox has talked about rebooting the "Fantastic Four" series, which debuted with the current cast in the distant past of 2005, and produced two less-than-successful movies. And the talk around the X-Men movies has been producing more prequel/origin stories rather than a true follow-up to "X-Men: The Last Stand".
Some of this "reboot-itis" comes from the success of the Batman reboot, which produced two hit movies this decade. However, "Batman Begins" came a full 16 years after "Batman", and even eight years after "Batman & Robin", the last pre-reboot film. A planned 2012 "Spider-Man" reboot would put just 10 years between "Spider-Man" origin stories and five years between the end of the previous series and the reboot. Just a decade ago, you couldn't have even considered starting a film series based on the same property twice in a decade. Now it's practically a trend.
I understand if the people involved in the "Spider-Man" series don't want to continue with the movies. People move on. But just because you're going to change the actors doesn't mean you have to ignore the continuity of previous three movies. "Spider-Man" has been around as a character for more than 40 years. Over that time, countless comic book artists have drawn him, each giving him a slightly different look. There's still a huge list of untapped "Spider-Man" villains, and even love interests other than Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy (I for one would love a Black Cat/Felicia Hardy storyline). Sony needs to have faith in the audience, that we can accept new people playing the same characters in the same continuity we already know. We may be the A.D.D. generation, but that doesn't make us unintelligent.
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