![]() ![]() But their effect on us as we read is not at all the same. Links are in one sense a variation on the textual allusions, citations, and footnotes that have long been common elements of documents. Hyperlinks also alter our experience of media. The technology is just a tool, inert until we pick it up and inert again once we set it aside. The implication, comforting in its hubris, is that we’re in control. It’s how we use it that matters, we tell ourselves. In the end, we come to pretend that the technology itself doesn’t matter. We’re too busy being dazzled or disturbed by the programming to notice what’s going on inside our heads. Our focus on a medium’s content can blind us to these deep effects. We become less reflective and more impulsive. When the brain is overloaded by stimuli, as it usually is when we’re peering into a network-connected computer screen, attention splinters, thinking becomes superficial, and memory suffers. It takes patience and concentration to evaluate new information-to gauge its accuracy, to weigh its relevance and worth, to put it into context-and the Internet, by design, subverts patience and concentration. The passageway from perception to understanding is narrow. ![]() When it comes to the quality of our thoughts and judgments, the amount of information a communication medium supplies is less important than the way the medium presents the information and the way, in turn, our minds take it in. The Shallows explains why we were mistaken about the Net. ![]()
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