Thomas Anderberg has an essay in Dagens Nyheter where he discusses the difference between reading a book and reading blogs on the internet. That is at least my interpretation of his discussion of Maryanne Wolfs book Proust and the Squid. Anderberg claims that the step from an oral tradition, advocated by Socrates, to reading can be parallelled with the step from reading a book and reading on the web.
If you browse the web there is two types of information: facts and ideas. A plane crashed here and there or something like the idea pictured above. The blogosphere consist of concise posts where an idea is surround by not so many words as in a book. This feature has been taken to an extreme, twitter, where the ideas are even more concentrated.
Wolf apparently think the a persons maturity is in danger when reading in this fashion. Especially so when young people without a book-developed knowledge base studies in this way. I'm not so sure that is correct. Is this not rather a development to the better where the mind get stimulated in a superior fashion for developing greater potential for creativity? Stimulated by ideas rather than words. This reasoning requires of course that the quality of the authors is equivalent.
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