The Shallows (31 page)

45.
Scott Corwin, Elisabeth Hartley, and Harry Hawkes, “The Library Rebooted,”
Strategy & Business
, Spring 2009.

Six
THE VERY IMAGE OF A BOOK

1.
Ting-i Tsai and Geoffrey A. Fowler, “Race Heats Up to Supply E-Reader Screens,”
Wall Street Journal
, December 29, 2009.

2.
Motoko Rich, “Steal This Book (for $9.99),”
New York Times
, May 16, 2009; Brad Stone, “Best Buy and Verizon Jump into E-Reader Fray,”
New York Times
, September 22, 2009; Brad Stone and Motoko Rich, “Turning Page, E-Books Start to Take Hold,”
New York Times
, December 23, 2008.

3.
Jacob Weisberg, “Curling Up with a Good Screen,”
Newsweek
, March 30, 2009. The italics are Weisberg’s.

4.
Charles McGrath, “By-the-Book Reader Meets the Kindle,”
New York Times
, May 29, 2009.

5.
L. Gordon Crovitz, “The Digital Future of Books,”
Wall Street Journal
, May 19, 2008.

6.
Debbie Stier, “Are We Having the Wrong Conversation about EBook Pricing?,” HarperStudio blog, February 26, 2009, http://theharperstudio.com/2009/02/are-we-having-the-wrong-conversation-about-ebook-pricing.

7.
Steven Johnson, “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write,”
Wall Street Journal
, April 20, 2009.

8.
Christine Rosen, “People of the Screen,”
New Atlantis
, Fall 2008.

9.
David A. Bell, “The Bookless Future: What the Internet Is Doing to Scholarship,”
New Republic
, May 2, 2005.

10.
John Updike, “The End of Authorship,”
New York Times Sunday Book Review
, June 25, 2006.

11.
Norimitsu Onishi, “Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular,”
New York Times
, January 20, 2008. See also Dana Goodyear, “I ♥ Novels,”
New Yorker
, December 22, 2008.

12.
Tim O’Reilly, “Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web,”
O’Reilly Radar
blog, April 29, 2009, http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/reinventing-the-book-age-of-web.html.

13.
Motoko Rich, “Curling Up with Hybrid Books, Videos Included,”
New York Times
, September 30, 2009.

14.
Johnson, “How the E-Book Will Change.”

15.
Andrew Richard Albanese, “Q&A: The Social Life of Books,”
Library Journal
, May 15, 2006.

16.
Kevin Kelly, “Scan this Book!”
New York Times Magazine
, May 14, 2006.

17.
Caleb Crain, “How Is the Internet Changing Literary Style?,”
Steamboats Are Ruining Everything
blog, June 17, 2008, www.steamthing.com/2008/06/how-is-the-inte.html.

18.
Some Kindle owners received a startling lesson in the ephemerality of digital text when, on the morning of July 17, 2009, they awoke to find that the e-book versions of George Orwell’s
1984
and
Animal Farm
they had purchased from Amazon.com had disappeared from their devices. It turned out that Amazon had erased the books from customers’ Kindles after discovering that the editions were unauthorized.

19.
Up to now, concerns about the influence of digital media on language have centered on the abbreviations and emoticons that kids use in instant messaging and texting. But such affectations will probably prove benign, just the latest twist in the long history of slang. Adults would be wiser to pay attention to how their own facility with writing is changing. Is their vocabulary shrinking or becoming more hackneyed? Is their syntax becoming less flexible and more formulaic? Those are the types of questions that matter in judging the Net’s long-run effects on the range and expressiveness of language.

20.
Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, “Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century,”
Annual Review of Sociology
, 31 (2005): 127–41. See also Caleb Crain, “Twilight of the Books,”
New Yorker
, December 24, 2007.

21.
Steven Levy, “The Future of Reading,”
Newsweek
, November 26, 2007.

22.
Alphonse de Lamartine,
Ouvres Diverses
(Brussels: Louis Hauman, 1836), 106–7. Translation by the author.

23.
Philip G. Hubert, “The New Talking Machines,”
Atlantic Monthly
, February 1889.

24.
Edward Bellamy, “With the Eyes Shut,”
Harper’s
, October 1889.

25.
Octave Uzanne, “The End of Books,”
Scribner’s Magazine
, August 1894.

26.
George Steiner, “Ex Libris,”
New Yorker
, March 17, 1997.

27.
Mark Federman, “Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. and Mrs. Smith Can’t Teach: The Challenge of Multiple Media Literacies in a Tumultuous Time,” undated, http://individual.utoronto.ca/ markfederman/ WhyJohnnyandJaneyCantRead.pdf.

28.
Clay Shirky, “Why Abundance Is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr,”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Blog
, July 17, 2008, www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/07/why-abundance-is-good-a-reply-to-nick-carr.

29.
Alberto Manguel,
The Library at Night
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 218.

30.
David M. Levy,
Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age
(New York: Arcade, 2001), 101–2.

Seven
THE JUGGLER’S BRAIN

1.
Katie Hafner, “Texting May Be Taking a Toll,”
New York Times
, May 25, 2009.

2.
Torkel Klingberg,
The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory
, trans. Neil Betteridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 166–67.

3.
Ap Dijksterhuis, “Think Different: The Merits of Unconscious Thought in Preference Development and Decision Making,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 87, no. 5 (2004): 586–98.

4.
Marten W. Bos, Ap Dijksterhuis, and Rick B. van Baaren, “On the Goal-Dependency of Unconscious Thought,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
, 44 (2008): 1114–20.

5.
Stefanie Olsen, “Are We Getting Smarter or Dumber?,” CNET News, September 21, 2005, http://news.cnet.com/Are-we-getting-smarter-or-dumber/2008-1008_3-5875404.html.

6.
Michael Merzenich, “Going Googly,”
On the Brain
blog, August 11, 2008, http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=177.

7.
Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan,
iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind
(New York: Collins, 2008), 1.

8.
G. W. Small, T. D. Moody, P. Siddarth, and S. Y. Bookheimer, “Your Brain on Google: Patterns of Cerebral Activation during Internet Searching,”
American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry
, 17, no. 2 (February 2009): 116–26. See also Rachel Champeau, “UCLA Study Finds That Searching the Internet Increases Brain Function,” UCLA Newsroom, October 14, 2008, http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-study-finds-that-searching-64348.aspx.

9.
Small and Vorgan,
iBrain
, 16–17.

10.
Maryanne Wolf, interview with the author, March 28, 2008.

11.
Steven Johnson,
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
(New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 19.

12.
John Sweller,
Instructional Design in Technical Areas
(Camberwell, Australia: Australian Council for Educational Research, 1999), 4.

13.
Ibid., 7.

14.
Ibid.

15.
Ibid., 11.

16.
Ibid., 4–5. For a broad review of current thinking on the limits of working memory, see Nelson Cowan,
Working Memory Capacity
(New York: Psychology Press, 2005).

17.
Klingberg,
Overflowing Brain
, 39 and 72–75.

18.
Sweller,
Instructional Design
, 22.

19.
George Landow and Paul Delany, “Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art,” in
Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality
, ed. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan (New York: Norton, 2001), 206–16.

20.
Jean-Francois Rouet and Jarmo J. Levonen, “Studying and Learning with Hypertext: Empirical Studies and Their Implications,” in
Hypertext and Cognition
, ed. Jean-Francois Rouet, Jarmo J. Levonen, Andrew Dillon, and Rand J. Spiro (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996), 16–20.

21.
David S. Miall and Teresa Dobson, “Reading Hypertext and the Experience of Literature,”
Journal of Digital Information
, 2, no. 1 (August 13, 2001).

22.
D. S. Niederhauser, R. E. Reynolds, D. J. Salmen, and P. Skolmoski, “The Influence of Cognitive Load on Learning from Hypertext,”
Journal of Educational Computing Research
, 23, no. 3 (2000): 237–55.

23.
Erping Zhu, “Hypermedia Interface Design: The Effects of Number of Links and Granularity of Nodes,”
Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia
, 8, no. 3 (1999): 331–58.

24.
Diana DeStefano and Jo-Anne LeFevre, “Cognitive Load in Hypertext Reading: A Review,”
Computers in Human Behavior
, 23, no. 3 (May 2007): 1616–41. The paper was originally published online on September 30, 2005.

25.
Steven C. Rockwell and Loy A. Singleton, “The Effect of the Modality of Presentation of Streaming Multimedia on Information Acquisition,”
Media Psychology
, 9 (2007): 179–91.

26.
Helene Hembrooke and Geri Gay, “The Laptop and the Lecture: The Effects of Multitasking in Learning Environments,”
Journal of Computing in Higher Education
, 15, no. 1 (September 2003): 46–64.

27.
Lori Bergen, Tom Grimes, and Deborah Potter, “How Attention Partitions Itself during Simultaneous Message Presentations,”
Human Communication Research
, 31, no. 3 (July 2005): 311–36.

28.
Sweller,
Instructional Design
, 137–47.

29.
K. Renaud, J. Ramsay, and M. Hair, “‘You’ve Got Email!’ Shall I Deal with It Now?,”
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
, 21, no. 3 (2006): 313–32.

30.
See, for example, J. Gregory Trafton and Christopher A. Monk, “Task Interruptions,”
Reviews of Human Factors and Ergonomics
, 3 (2008): 111–26. Researchers believe that frequent interruptions lead to cognitive overload and impair the formation of memories.