In “The Shallows”, Nicholas Carr makes a very good argument that replacing deep reading books, with the necessarily shallower reading online or of hypertext in general, causes changes in our brains which makes deep thinking harder and less effective.
Thinking about “The Shallows” later, I realized that laziness and other avoidance behaviors will also tend to become ingrained in your brain, at the expense of your self-direction/self-discipline behaviors they are replacing.
Another problem with the Web, that wasn’t discussed in “The Shallows”, is that hypertext channels you to the connections the author chooses to present. Wide and deep reading, such that you make the information presented yours, gives you more background knowledge that helps you find your own connections. It is in the creation of your own links within your own mind that information is turned into knowledge.
Carr actually has two other general theses in the book; that neural plasticity to some degree undercuts the more extreme claims of evolutionary psych, which I have some doubts about and am doing further reading on; and he winds up with a pretty silly argument about the implausibility of AI. Fortunately, his main argument about the problems with using hypertext is totally independent of these two.
I haven’t read Nicholas Carr, but I’ve seen summaries of some of the studies used to claim that book reading results in more comprehension than hypertext reading. All the ones I saw are bogus. They all use, for the hypertext reading, a linear extract from a book, broken up into sections separated by links. Sometimes the links are placed in somewhat arbitrary places. Of course a linear text can be read more easily linearly.
I believe hypertext reading is deeper, and that this is obvious, almost true by definition. Non-hypertext reading is exactly 1 layer deep. Hypertext lets the reader go deeper. Literally. You can zoom in on any topic.
A more fair test would be to give students a topic to study, with the same material, but some given books, and some given the book material organized and indexed in a competent way as hypertext.
Wide and deep reading, such that you make the information presented yours, gives you more background knowledge that helps you find your own connections.
Hypertext reading lets you find your own connections, and lets you find background knowledge that would otherwise simply be edited out of a book.
It seems to me that the main reason most hypertext sources seem to produce shallower reading is not the fact that it contains hypertext itself, but that the barriers of publication are so low that the quality of most written work online is usually much lower than printed material. For example, this post is something that I might have spent 3 minutes thinking about before posting, whereas a printed publication would have much more time to mature and also many more filters such as publishers to take out the noise.
It is more likely that book reading seems more deep because the quality is better.
Also, it wouldn’t be difficult to test this hypothesis with print and online newspaper since they both contain the same material.
It seems to me like “books are slower to produce than online material, so they’re higher quality” would belong to the class of statements that are true on average but close to meaningless in practice. There’s enormous variance in the quality of both digital and printed texts, and whether you absorb more good or bad material depends more on which digital/print sources you seek out than on whether you prefer digital or print sources overall.
Agree completely. While most of what’s on the internet is low-quality, it’s easy to find the domains of reliably high-quality thought. I’ve long felt that I get more intellectual stimulation from a day of reading blogs than I’ve gotten from a lifetime of reading printed periodicals.
It’s not that books take longer to produce, it’s that books just tend to have higher quality, and a corollary of that is that they frequently take longer to produce. Personally I feel fairly certain that the average quality of my online reading is substantially lower than offline reading.
I believe hypertext reading is deeper, and that this is obvious, almost true by definition. Non-hypertext reading is exactly 1 layer deep. Hypertext lets the reader go deeper. Literally. You can zoom in on any topic.
It has deeper structure, but that is not necessarily user-friendly. A great textbook will have different levels of explanation, an author-designed depth-diving experience. Depending on author, material, you and the local wikipedia quality that might be a better or worse learning experience.
Hypertext reading lets you find your own connections, and lets you find background knowledge that would otherwise simply be edited out of a book.
Yep, definitely a benefit, but not without a trade-off. Often a good author will set you up with connections better than you can.
I like allenwang’s reply below, but there is another consideration with books.
Long before hyperlinks, books evolved comprehensive indices and references, and these allow humans to relatively easily and quickly jump between topics in one book and across books.
Now are the jumps we employ on the web faster? Certainly. But the difference is only quantitative, not qualitative, and the web version isn’t enormously faster.
Hypertext reading has a strong potential, but it also has negative aspects that you don’t have as much with standard books. For example, it’s much easier to get distracted or side-tracked with a lot of secondary information that might not even be very important.
It is very difficult to distinguish rationalisations of the discomfort of change, with actual consequences. If this belief that hypertext leads to a less sophisticated understanding than reading a book, what behaviour would change that could be measured?
In “The Shallows”, Nicholas Carr makes a very good argument that replacing deep reading books, with the necessarily shallower reading online or of hypertext in general, causes changes in our brains which makes deep thinking harder and less effective.
Thinking about “The Shallows” later, I realized that laziness and other avoidance behaviors will also tend to become ingrained in your brain, at the expense of your self-direction/self-discipline behaviors they are replacing.
Another problem with the Web, that wasn’t discussed in “The Shallows”, is that hypertext channels you to the connections the author chooses to present. Wide and deep reading, such that you make the information presented yours, gives you more background knowledge that helps you find your own connections. It is in the creation of your own links within your own mind that information is turned into knowledge.
Carr actually has two other general theses in the book; that neural plasticity to some degree undercuts the more extreme claims of evolutionary psych, which I have some doubts about and am doing further reading on; and he winds up with a pretty silly argument about the implausibility of AI. Fortunately, his main argument about the problems with using hypertext is totally independent of these two.
I haven’t read Nicholas Carr, but I’ve seen summaries of some of the studies used to claim that book reading results in more comprehension than hypertext reading. All the ones I saw are bogus. They all use, for the hypertext reading, a linear extract from a book, broken up into sections separated by links. Sometimes the links are placed in somewhat arbitrary places. Of course a linear text can be read more easily linearly.
I believe hypertext reading is deeper, and that this is obvious, almost true by definition. Non-hypertext reading is exactly 1 layer deep. Hypertext lets the reader go deeper. Literally. You can zoom in on any topic.
A more fair test would be to give students a topic to study, with the same material, but some given books, and some given the book material organized and indexed in a competent way as hypertext.
Hypertext reading lets you find your own connections, and lets you find background knowledge that would otherwise simply be edited out of a book.
It seems to me that the main reason most hypertext sources seem to produce shallower reading is not the fact that it contains hypertext itself, but that the barriers of publication are so low that the quality of most written work online is usually much lower than printed material. For example, this post is something that I might have spent 3 minutes thinking about before posting, whereas a printed publication would have much more time to mature and also many more filters such as publishers to take out the noise.
It is more likely that book reading seems more deep because the quality is better.
Also, it wouldn’t be difficult to test this hypothesis with print and online newspaper since they both contain the same material.
It seems to me like “books are slower to produce than online material, so they’re higher quality” would belong to the class of statements that are true on average but close to meaningless in practice. There’s enormous variance in the quality of both digital and printed texts, and whether you absorb more good or bad material depends more on which digital/print sources you seek out than on whether you prefer digital or print sources overall.
Agree completely. While most of what’s on the internet is low-quality, it’s easy to find the domains of reliably high-quality thought. I’ve long felt that I get more intellectual stimulation from a day of reading blogs than I’ve gotten from a lifetime of reading printed periodicals.
It’s not that books take longer to produce, it’s that books just tend to have higher quality, and a corollary of that is that they frequently take longer to produce. Personally I feel fairly certain that the average quality of my online reading is substantially lower than offline reading.
It has deeper structure, but that is not necessarily user-friendly. A great textbook will have different levels of explanation, an author-designed depth-diving experience. Depending on author, material, you and the local wikipedia quality that might be a better or worse learning experience.
Yep, definitely a benefit, but not without a trade-off. Often a good author will set you up with connections better than you can.
But not better than a good hypertext author can.
If the hypertext is intentionally written as a book, which is generally not the case.
I like allenwang’s reply below, but there is another consideration with books.
Long before hyperlinks, books evolved comprehensive indices and references, and these allow humans to relatively easily and quickly jump between topics in one book and across books.
Now are the jumps we employ on the web faster? Certainly. But the difference is only quantitative, not qualitative, and the web version isn’t enormously faster.
Hypertext reading has a strong potential, but it also has negative aspects that you don’t have as much with standard books. For example, it’s much easier to get distracted or side-tracked with a lot of secondary information that might not even be very important.
It is very difficult to distinguish rationalisations of the discomfort of change, with actual consequences. If this belief that hypertext leads to a less sophisticated understanding than reading a book, what behaviour would change that could be measured?