http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the
malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory
circuits that control its artificial »
brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too.
A recently published study of online research habits, conducted by
scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be
in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of
the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs
documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one
operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational
consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other
sources of written information. They found that people using the sites
exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to
another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They
typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book
before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a
long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and
actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense;
indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as
users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and
abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to
avoid reading in the traditional sense.