Change is on the cards, but this time it will be hard

“When I am online I am perpetually aware of open-endedness, of potentiality, and psychologically I am fragmented. I make my way forward through whatever text is in front of me factoring in not just the indeterminacy of whatever is next on the page, I am also alert, even if subliminally, to the idea of the whole, the adjacency of all information. However determined I am to focus on the task at hand, I am haunted by this idea of the whole. Which is different than what I might experience sitting in a library chair knowing that I’m in the midst of three floors of stacks. The difference has to do with permeability, with the imminence of linkage, and it is decisive.
…
when Nicholas Carr talks about how it gets harder and harder to stay with a book—and there is an avalanche of this sort of testimony—I see it as evidence that exposure to the intransitive genius of cyberspace does begin to affect our responses, our cognition, when we are not online. That we are being modified.

Sven Bikerts “Reading in the Open-ended Information Zone Called Cyberspace”

I made a brief reference to Carr’s Atlantic article in my own minor staring-at-the-object rumination last Friday, but obviously that venue (nor Atlantic Monthly, even) isn’t the place for the sort of research-driven understanding of the way in which we not only create, but receive information online (obviously, in Girl Talk’s case as in so many others, those two things are very much intertwined). This sort of thing fascinates me, and there will be more said by me as I find ways to say it. For starters, I appreciate Bikerts’ anecdotal addendum (I’ve helpfully highlighted my favorite sentences); his opening paragraph reminds me of that longstanding philosophical question pondered by those who study technology (and I’m paraphrasing): “where exactly are you when you’re talking on the phone?”

I also like Dr. Murdoch’s take on the subject: