In reading some of the comments posted online about my Atlantic piece, I kept coming across references to the article being “four pages long.” At first I wondered, “Can’t these people count? The article is six pages long!” (OK, five pages if you exclude the illustration and titling.) Then I realized – duh! – that people were referring to the online version of the article, which indeed is divided into four “pages.” (Of course, a page of text on the web is an arbitrary construct, so knowing the number of web pages doesn’t actually tell you much about the length of a piece, but that’s another story.)<\/p>\n
Anyway, it would be interesting to do a study of how the experience of reading a particular piece of writing varies depending on whether a person reads it in print or online. A couple of people have pointed to the inclusion of hyperlinks in the web version of my article as showing the superiority of the web as a medium for writing. I don’t buy that (even though I’m well aware of the value of links). These days, I share Jon Udell’s sense of relief in reading text without links. Jon writes<\/a>: “Nick Carr\u2019s essay in the current Atlantic Monthly crystallizes a lot of what I\u2019ve been feeling for a couple of years about how our use of the Net is changing us. Not co-incidentally I read the essay in the printed magazine whose non-hypertextuality I experienced as a feature, not a bug.” Hyperlinks have a lot of utility, but they’re distractions as well, scattering concentration and, often, getting in the way of deep reading.<\/p>\n Now go click on that link and read the rest of Udell’s post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In reading some of the comments posted online about my Atlantic piece, I kept coming across references to the article being “four pages long.” At first I wondered, “Can’t these people count? The article is six pages long!” (OK, five pages if you exclude the illustration and titling.) Then I realized – duh! – that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}