In the next few blogs, I'd like to take a look at money -- what it is, how we use it, and how we view it.

There’s little question that we are more sensitive to change today because of the speed with which we receive information. In 1805, word of British Admiral Horatio Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar did not reach North America until six weeks later. Now, any news, in any remote area, can be transmitted around the world in seconds.

The media and the speed with which investors are gathering investment information today are changing as well. Many people still subscribe to newsletters, brokerage reports, and The Wall Street Journal. But many more are replacing paper-based investment information sources with electronic ones-most notably, television and the World Wide Web. Circulation of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times has fallen over the past ten years; CNBC’s viewers have tripled in that timeframe. And millions of investors are also flocking to investment industry Web sites like The Motley Fool or CNNMoney.com.

To keep up with a stock market that seems to move with the speed of a supernova, many investors are turning to the real-time, software-based information tools that are available on the Internet. Just a few years ago, most investors had to go to a library and leaf through yellowed copies of The Wall Street Journal or The Economist to figure out whether it was a good time to buy or sell their stocks. Today, an astounding number of sources on the Internet give much better information and deliver it ten times faster.

The immediacy of electronic delivery channels meets the needs of today’s time-strapped investment consumers. Television and the Internet have helped fuel that trend by removing some of the mystery that had surrounded the stock market. Anyone with a remote control or a Web browser now has access to the kind of information that used to be available only to big firms. Not everyone may want to check basis-point disparities in Portuguese debentures at 1:00 A.M. in their pajamas, but you can if you want to.