time for "teletrailing"

I love hyperlinks, in blog posts and tweets. They help me conveniently follow and share trails of interest, and used judiciously can help me stay focused on one thread while noting and filing potentially relevant connections to others.


But Julian Baggini raises a reasonable worry, that over-reliance on them (which he calls "teletrailing") could make us even more scattered, superficial, and short-attention-spanned than we are already.

The most popular lament about new media is of course how it shortens attention spans and with it the shrinking of the amount of detail and information people are prepared to grapple with. Teletrailing seems to reduce the object of focus almost to vanishing point. The extent and rapidity of this change can be seen by how, already, blogs are looking quite earnest and old-fashioned. When blogs first appeared, they were compared unfavorably with newspaper and magazine articles. They tended to be shorter, were written more quickly, were light on research and heavy on opinion. But to those growing up on Facebook and Twitter, they must seem ponderously slow and long. For those who value thoughtful, crafted writing, this is a worrying development. 

Thanks, Julian. I needed more to worry about. I'll re-tweet the link to your essay and we can all collaborate on a solution. Eh-oh...