Reading Blogs Might Make You a Better Person

[BridgeTheGap]

Writing for The Awl, Maria Bustillos argues convincingly against recent suggestions that the cognitive habits enforced by web browsing are making people dumb. Taking on Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (recently expanded into a book), Bustillos dismantles one of Carr’s main ideas. As she says:

Hyperlinks, the proliferation of which Mr. Carr largely blames for his mental infirmity, are in no way different from footnotes. Footnotes, too, demand “microseconds of decision-making attention.” Just as a footnote does, a hyperlink beckons you away from the main text in order to examine tangentially-related but relevant material. Exactly like a hyperlink, a footnote often has the effect of sending you down a series of rabbit holes, from which you emerge hours later, armed with a dozen other books—that is, if you want to investigate the subject in fine detail. If you don’t, then by all means, you can skip the footnotes.

So do footnotes also “sap cognitive power from the reading process”?

http://www.utne.com/media/reading-blogs-good-or-bad.aspx?utm_content=06.09.10+Great+Writing&utm_campaign=Emerging+Ideas-Every+Day&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email

[FSogol]

1. Shades of "books will make us dumb becasue we won't have to learn it?"

:shrug: Maria Bustillos is just saying that she is afraid of change.