"Deep Reading" and the Internet - Mari Biella
Recently there’s been quite a lot of handwringing about the internet’s effect on “deep reading”, and about the so-called “ADHD Generation”, who supposedly can’t concentrate on anything longer than a tweet or Facebook update. If that is indeed so, then it’s obviously bad news for all authors – but is it true? There’s a sense in which it’s hard not to sympathise with this doom-laden scenario. After all, the internet makes a wealth of information available at your fingertips, and in order to process and absorb even a fraction of it you have to be slightly selective. Surfing the web entails an awful lot of grazing and skimming, not to mention a degree of online promiscuity: one leaps onto a webpage, quickly scans a few sentences, and then – if not sufficiently entranced – hotfoots it out of the virtual door and over to the next page. Hyperlinks make that process even more simple; it’s very easy to get distracted when a juicy new page is beckoning enticingly. Why, there’s even a n...