Unreadable

Joe Clark

Joe Clark lives in Toronto and made a name for himself in Web accessibility, for all the good it did him. Entering his fifth year of trying to raise a pittance for an accessibility research project, he has decided to spend more time working on his next three books.
http://joeclark.org

A species-wide experiment has been carried out on the world’s cyber citizens and the results are in. Thanks to the web, our brains are changing and our ability to read long is going the way of the typewriter. Is this really what we had in mind?

Further Reading

• Is Google Making Us Stupid?

This article was originally published in Scroll Number 1, on the 23^rd of September 2008. You can obtain this issue in print by scrolling over to the Purchase page.

Comments on this article

1. 

   Written by RawMuslBlogs ¶ Personal Weblog of Joe Clark, Toronto on the 17^th of October 2008.

   […] Yeah, I just wrote about that. […]

2. 

   Written by Michael Montgomery on the 21^st of October 2008.

   Good article, if a bit pessimistic.

   When I reached Joe’s closing paragraph, the feeling was eerie. Yes, I did read it. Not with much effort, but yes, I had printed it out.

   When it comes to reading, paper still wins. Can you say, “print stylesheets, FTW!”

3. 

   Written by Pedro Mendes on the 29^th of October 2008.

   Great view on the current situation. I also don’t read long articles online. I agree they don’t work. I’ve seen countless blog post that look like essays, and am immediatrly turned off by them. I do struggle to print some of them in a usable way. I, nevertheless, still read long offline material such as fiction, and non fiction. In my opinion, when it comes to long text, nothing beats paper in hand.