' “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains,” he says. The daily use of computers, smartphones, search engines, and other such tools “stimulates brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release, gradually strengthening new neural pathways in our brains while weakening old ones.” '
#GarySmall quoted in #TheShallows by #NicolasCarr #UCLA #MemoryAndAgingCenter #Online #BrainChange
'The need to evaluate links and make related navigational choices, while also processing..fleeting sensory stimuli, requires constant mental coordination and decision making, distracting..from the work of interpreting text.. Whenever readers, come upon a link, we have to pause.. to allow our prefrontal cortex to evaluate whether or not..[to] click.. The redirection.. from reading words to making judgments.. shown to impede comprehension and retention ' #hyperlnks bad for #reading #comprehension

'..hypertext substantially increases readers’ cognitive load and hence weakens their ability to comprehend and retain what they’re reading. A 1989 study showed that readers of hypertext often ended up clicking distractedly “through pages instead of reading them carefully.” A 1990 experiment revealed that hypertext readers often “could not remember what they had and had not read.”.. '

I guess it's good to keep links out of the body of text you hope readers will comprehend and think on.

'Even though.. hypertext [is]commonplace.. research show[s] that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links. In.. 2001..scholars asked seventy people to read “The Demon Lover,”..One group read the story in..linear-text.. a second group read..[it] with links, as you’d find on a Web page. The hypertext readers took longer to read the story, yet..they also reported more confusion and uncertainty..'
'..researchers hypothesized that people who used the links would gain a richer understanding of the two theories and their differences than would people who read the pages sequentially, completing one before going on to the other. They were wrong. The test subjects who read the pages linearly actually scored considerably higher on a.. #comprehension test than those who clicked back and forth between the pages. The links got in the way of learning, the researchers concluded.' #hyperlinks
Sometimes I feel bad about #Microblogging. Am I helping to wreck people's attention spans? To cut down character counts I often have to insert tags in the body of quotes. Maybe there is a writer's discipline, habits, to use the power of tags and hyperlinks to grow new works, #OriginalConfigurations that #DigitalGarden people write about. A #Microblog lets you quickly keep track of ideas, then you elaborate them while sharing on #Hubzilla, further elaborate with #Wiki or #WebPages...

I'll force myself to go over this thread. I was excited to finally find these parts of TheShallows! I'll either make Hubzilla posts that keep all links out of the body or keep working in org-mode with the gitlab setup that seems to be working now, though I haven't tested images yet. For me for now, org-mode is the best chance for deep writing, But I'd like to be able to introduce other #DigitalGarden approaches, with #Hubzilla, maybe even with #Zim.

https://gitlab.com/bzmall2/digdenorg

Brian Small / digdenorg

Example org-mode site using GitLab Pages: https://pages.gitlab.io/org-mode Hoping to work the example into a digital garden.

GitLab
My ideal setup would be Racket and #Scribble, something like #OtherJoel where the website can be printed too. It's great that there might be ways to bridge the gaps among on-line and paper media. I'll try to document a journey into pollen and printable on-line texts with org-mode. Hubzilla Wikis and WebPages are great, but I won't figure out how to do includes of boiler plate and such. org-mode and scribble are more general purpose. Gotta get #Pollen to output bbcode!
https://github.com/otherjoel/try-pollen/
GitHub - otherjoel/try-pollen: 📔🌼 An example website/book created with Pollen.

📔🌼 An example website/book created with Pollen. Contribute to otherjoel/try-pollen development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub