Fascinating and long article (via dihard) about how the internet is changing how we read — and, as a result, how we think. 

One thread that sticks out is about how we do much more “skimming”, due to online reading.

When we read online, [Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University,] says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

According to the article, here’s what we may stand to lose:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

The observation that we skim more superficially is not particularly surprising or new; nor are the author’s and Wolf’s reservations about such changes.

But they miss something big.  Online media certainly do encourage spending much less time “interpreting text” and making “rich mental connections” while we’re sitting there reading your article.  These very same media, though, allow for much more active writing, wherein, as members of the former audience, ”we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas”.