In the 90’s I believed in multitasking. I was wrong. The human capacity for multitasking is a myth. In the aughts I believed in links — still do. Maybe I’m wrong again. Nick Carr thinks so:

Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.

He goes on, as does my resistance:

In The Shallows, I examine the hyperlink as just one element among many – including multimedia, interruptions, multitasking, jerky eye movements, divided attention, extraneous decision making, even social anxiety – that tend to promote hurried, distracted, and superficial thinking online. To understand the effects of the Web on our minds, you have to consider the cumulative effects of all these features rather than just the effects of any one individually.

The book, I’m pleased to say, has already prompted a couple of experiments in what I’ll call delinkification. Laura Miller, in her Salon review of The Shallows, put all her links at the end of the piece rather than sprinkling them through the text. She asked readers to comment on what they thought of the format. As with Gillmor’s early experiments, Miller’s seemed a little silly on first take. The Economist writer Tom Standage tweeted a chortle: “Ho Ho.” But if you read through the (many) comments her review provoked, you will hear a chorus of approval for removing links from text.

I like to think of the link as part of the language in which I write. I would rather quote than summarize — it credits the author and is less likely to be misunderstood. I link to note to the reader the authority I give to the text. Sometimes I link as commentary.

As a reader I ride links like a surfer rides the waves. Isn’t that where the phrase surf the net came from? Follow my curiosity to wherever interest, intellect and curiosity take me. The goal is an agile mind that can quickly access, cross-reference, and synthesize a three dimensional view of the object of my interest.

I’ll read Carr’s book — or try to. As if to make his point I confess I read far fewer books than I used to. Instead I read the commentary and conversation around them. I think it part of life lived in the hive mind. Maybe that mind is myth. We live and learn.

If you, dear readers, would rather I collect links at the end of my posts I’ll give it a shot. For example:

– The site for Carr’s book,
– Wikipedia entry on multitasking,
– The Salon review w/comments,
– Discussion via Techmeme (you’ll find the usual suspects there).

Do read Carr’s whole post before jumping to any conclusions. Or must we wait to form conclusions until after we read the book? The criticism of the book? The criticism answered?

You can find me @jwindish, at my Public Notebook, or email me at joe-AT-joewindish-DOT-com.