Does the Brain Like E-Books? – Room for Debate Blog – NYTimes.com. “Show me one person who has made a serendipitous discovery while wandering the library stacks, and I will show you a thousand whose eyes glazed over at the sheer anomie, inefficiency, and meaninglessness of it all”
“To a great extent, the computer’s usefulness for serious reading depends on the user’s strength of character.”
” The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it”
” in a world where (in any decent-sized gathering of students) you can practically see the text messages buzz around the room and bounce off the walls, each as memorable as a housefly; where the narrowing time between writing for and publishing on the Web is helping to kill the art of editing by crushing it to death. The Internet makes words as cheap and as significant as Cheese Doodles.”
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“the meaning and music of the words is what matters, not the glitzy vehicle they arrive in.”
“research shows that people are continually distracted when working with digital information. They switch simple activities an average of every three minutes (e.g. reading email or IM) and switch projects about every 10 and a half minutes. It’s just not possible to engage in deep thought about a topic when we’re switching so rapidly.”
