You're Not Getting Smarter

Among the numerous theories lolling around in my messy office cubicle of a mind is this: Reading the Web won't make you smarter.

Dead-tree-edition books, magazines and newspapers will, in that order of efficacy. Jumping hither and yon on the Web, I get the effect of scanning a printed newspaper: I remember the headlines, but not the stories. I grasp the trivia, but not the meaning. Were you to quiz me on the day's events following a Web-surfing session, I would be able to regurgitate headlines. But could I comment intelligently on the items I'd seen using information I'd just acquired? I doubt it.

By contrast, I'm still thinking deeply (no pun intended) about a book on water policy I stopped reading over a week ago, Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water. Reading the words in a book, with no hypertext or graphical distractions, seems to have planted thoughts in my mind with roots deeper and stronger than thoughts planted by Web readings would develop. Further, when I'm ready to blog those thoughts, I'll only need to flip to my margin notes for supporting material. By writing in the margins, I preserved either whole thoughts or links to memories of whole thoughts that I can access at will. In a way, one could call margin notes hypertext links to content stored in the original personal server, the brain. While this blog serves in part as a reminder of things I've seen on the Web and may want to examine again, I won't have any margin notes (save the linktext) when I return. I could create a kind of margin note by laboriously copying and pasting each meaningful paragraph of a Web document into my blog and commenting upon it. But when describing a task requires an adjective like "laboriously," one can effortlessly guess how likely that task is to be performed.

Now one could raise this objection: It's even more laborious to blog one's book-initiated thoughts because that requires typing in the book's text and then commenting upon it. All too true. But if I have established that the quality of my blogging increases when the printed word prompts it, rather than the electronic word, the labor may be worth it. And if adding printed content to the blogosphere adds to the diversity of material contained therein, all the better.
The key here may be that doing things slowly means doing things better. (All the people I've pestered to hurry up, hurry up, hurry up may scoff at this "revelation," but what are you gonna do?) Reading books takes more time than reading the Web, at least for me, and produces better outcomes. Writing this post slowly -- it's the first I've ever saved for later editing in w.bloggar -- has in my estimation also produced a better outcome.

What implications does this have for blogging, a kind of publishing where speed mostly rules? That's a topic for another post, considered slowly.