Book: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
Quotes of Book: The Shallows: What the
Another recent study, this one on academic research, provides real-world evidence of the way the tools we use to sift information online influence our mental habits and frame our thinking. James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, assembled an enormous database on 34 million scholarly articles published in academic journals from 1945 through 2005. He analyzed the citations included in the articles to see if patterns of citation, and hence of research, have changed as journals have shifted from being printed on paper to being published online. Considering how much easier it is to search digital text than printed text, the common assumption has been that making journals available on the Net would significantly broaden the scope of scholarly research, leading to a much more diverse set of citations. But that's not at all what Evans discovered. As more journals moved online, scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. And as old issues of printed journals were digitized and uploaded to the Web, scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information led, as Evans described it, to a "narrowing of science and scholarship."31 In explaining the counterintuitive findings in a 2008 Science article, Evans noted that automated information-filtering tools, such as search engines, tend to serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn't. The ease of following hyperlinks, moreover, leads online researchers to "bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers" would routinely skim as they flipped through the pages of a journal or a book. The quicker that scholars are able to "find prevailing opinion," wrote Evans, the more likely they are "to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles." Though much less efficient than searching the Web, old-fashioned library research probably served to widen scholars' horizons: "By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past."32 The easy way may not always be the best way, but the easy way is the way our computers and search engines encourage us to take. book-quote
