Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980, when television was our medium of choice. But its a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking- perhaps even a new sense of the self. "We are not only what we read" says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University, "we are how we read" Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts "efficiency" and "immediacy" above all else, amy be weakening our capacity of the kind of deep reading that emerged when earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become more "decoders of information" Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distractions, remains largely disengaged. (61)
I agree with this excerpt because I think that the internet has changed the way that people read and absorb the information they read. The internet makes it easy to have access to a lot of information at any given time, and its become more common for people to skim over lots of information than to actually read and take in one source. While this may help get many sides to an argument or help see the broader idea, it hinders the ability to thoroughly understand one aspect.
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