This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 04 Nov 2008, by Bill H.
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04 Nov 08
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“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
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Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages
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I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,”
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a form of skimming activity
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hopping from one source to anothe
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no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another
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, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s,
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But it’s a different kind of reading
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behind it lies a different kind of thinking
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You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts
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When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed
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In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.”
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The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.
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