See "Killing the written word by snippets
Students are trading in books for search-and-seizure learning on the Internet, and real literacy is getting lost along the way"
at
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-baron28nov28,0,5518046.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Dr. Baron wrote about Google and the Internet, describing how 

"A FEW YEARS BACK, I asked my undergraduates to read Robert Putnam's BOWLING ALONE. The class was discussing the effects of the Internet on social interaction, and Putnam's carefully documented analysis of the breakdown of Americans' connections to one another offered a good frame of reference. 

The students balked.

Was I aware that the book was 541 pages long? Didn't I know Putnam had written a précis of his argument a couple of years earlier, which they easily found on the Web? Why did they have to slog through so many examples of the same point?"

The professor wonders about her students:  "Has written culture recently taken a nose drive? These are the students who grew up on Spark Notes, the popular study guides. Many of this generation are aliterate * they know how to read but don't choose to."

She worries, "Will effortless random access erode our collective respect for writing as a logical, linear process? Such respect matters because it undergirds modern education, which is premised on thought, evidence and analysis rather than memorization and dogma. Reading successive pages and chapters teaches us how to follow a sustained line of reasoning."

Kevin Drum recently wrote about a related phenomemon * a shorter attention span -- in his blog, noting:

"The same is true of me. It's not just that I spend less time reading books, it's that I find my mind wandering when I do read. After a few paragraphs, or maybe a page or two, I'll run into a sentence that suddenly reminds me of something * and then spend the next minute staring into space thinking of something entirely unrelated to the book at hand. Eventually I snap back, but obviously this behavior reduces both my reading rate and my reading comprehension.

Is this really because of blogging? I don't know for sure, but it feels like it's related to blogging, and it's a real problem." 

Maarja's note:  As some who, during a particularly stressful time in my life a few years ago, found relaxation and solace by settling down briefly each evening in the little spare time I had to immerse myself in Michael Beschloss's Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963, which runs some 816 pages, I was fascinated to read about this phenomenon!

Maarja

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