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there are different problems wedged on top of each other in the op article, really. one is the implications of the net/computer monitor as a medium on reading and writing; the other, within the first, is the organization of information via the advertising medium that is google etc.
a. it is obvious and has been obvious that writing on a computer without printing what you are doing tends to make you write in monitor-sized blocks.
it is obvious that netreading is not the same as paper-reading, but i'm not sure of why that it--personally, i think it follows mostly from the way the monitor is lit more than from anything else--i don't generally read with a light pointing directly into my eyes, even if it's diffused--do you?
b. it's a pretty strange move to use nietzsche as an allegory to demonstrate the "problem" entailed my shortening the text-unit you work with. it is a strange move to use nietzsche to "demonstrate" a technological-determinist argument running shaped by some strange equation that long=better=deeper.
mostly, longer is just longer.
anne rice, for example.
it is not always the case that longer=only longer--there's a huge list of authors i could rattle off that demonstrate this not-terribly-shocking claim--"the recognitions" for example, to pick a (wrongly) obscure one.
so i really don't know what this guy is on about at the level of writing.
c. at the level of reading, i think the problem is real, but only with certain assumptions in place--the main being that folk do not recognize that they probably read one way online and another off of paper. alot of folk do both, yes? i don't particular see a flattening or anything else following necessarily from the fact of reading off a monitor unless tons of people go the way of only reading off a monitor and somehow manage to forget that this type of reading comes with trade-offs (which the article outlines)...
d. google and the ordering of information as a list is a different question.
i think that lists are the least imaginative possible way to order anything and the only are used because they were used before and it takes folk a while to wear out what they already know and maybe start thinking that--hey, maybe the simultaneous nature of net-infotainment is something we can use to advantage instead of trying to defeat it with this stupid linear displays.
there are lots of other ways to think about ordering information.
linear is a boring and stupid one, unnecessarily and arbitrarily hierarchical--and it conflates number of hits with quality of information in a ridiculous fashion--and so is of a piece with the collapse of consumer actions with other types of evaluation--but even here, in all its stupidity, the consequences for american politics are much worse than anything google et al manage to inflict or perpetuate or whatever you may decide they do (choose you own verb)
but that's another matter.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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