May I recommend to you a fine article? Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nick Carr in the Atlantic is quite good, particularly the parts on how the web is shaping the craft of writing. (Thx Carlo) To borrow a phrase I heard someone use this morning, "as I said on Twitter":
Well, for one thing, in a pre-web world the title wouldn't have led with a brand name and ended with "stupid."
I've actually been thinking quite a bit lately about the qualitative differences between writing pre-web/offline and writing for the web today. In fact, just before lunch I was pouring over some of Jakob Neilsen's research that used a heat-sensing device to track how people reading online. (In short, we tend to read in an "F" pattern online -- the first few lines and then quickly down the left side.)
My interest is mostly just self interest, as someone aiming to make a living putting words together and seeing the writing on the wall when it comes to print. In a way, it's troubling to me. On the one hand, the way I think is perfectly matched to the way the web works. I'm always searching for links between different fields of study, time periods, people, networks. Connections are just the way I attempt to make sense of the world, and always have. Studying cultural anthropology in both undergrad and grad school only served to strengthen those muscles. But on the other hand, the suspect way I'm inclined to write is better suited for print. Stringing together words for the web, though, rewards punch and finality, but it's much more comfortable for me to slowly unpack an argument and leave lots of loose ends laying about. In acclimating myself to our digital future, one of the precepts that I'm coming to accept is that it's okay to have "strong opinions weakly held" online that are even stronger and even more weakly held than the ones I would express in the ink-and-paper world. What's on the digital page doesn't have to be an exact representation of what's in the ol' analog head.Tricky stuff. And then there's the Kindle! I haven't even begun to ponder what it means for print writing to be styled to fit an Internet-based technology that is itself designed to look like an old-fashioned book...
