Ours is the Internet Age: I for one did not know there was so much controversy over “hyper-reading” and “hypertext”--yet the scholarly world seems to have many problems with both of these concepts. The main problem for academics lies in the barely researchable reading that is found in hypertext. As Sosnoski states in his writing, “Because readers characteristically navigate textual landscapes by searching them for key words and thus often omitting passages that do not ‘match,’ hyper-reading will be labeled ‘subjective,’ ‘superficial,’ and ‘de-contextualized’” (Sosnoski 164).
While this is understandable, one must remember that academia is only a small portion of the population that uses computers. The rest of us? I doubt we have much of an excuse to be opposed to hyper-reading, other than the fact that if you spend too much time in front of a computer screen, your eyes will be tired.
I give Sosnoski credit for labeling and explaining the breakdown of hyper-reading: “filtering,” “skimming,” “pecking,” “imposing,” “filming,” “trespassing,” “de-authorizing,” and “fragmenting” (163). As I read the description of each of these items, I found myself silently agreeing: when I am researching topics on the Internet, I automatically wade through the many options and passages that I could read that might be related to my research. I filter, I skim, I impose… Each person, knowingly or not, completes at least one of the actions from this list during hyper-reading. It is a study in human behavior that Sosnoski has nailed solidly.
In the end, Sosnoski was seemingly on the fence about the good side and the bad side of hyper-reading. “[He] believe[s] that phenomenon such as hyper-reading will be perceived by anti-cybernauts as a loss of coherence, substance, and depth” (173). I would say that his belief is perfectly accurate. As we all know, hyper-reading is going to become increasingly common. Again agreeing with Sosnoski, I think that this won’t (and shouldn’t) replace books--the dead-tree kind, as one of my other professors likes to call it.
That doesn’t mean that we all can’t learn to adapt a little with the changing technology.
Try to remember that the war does recieve coverage in every source of media on a daily basis. The reason Michael Jackson recieved so much attention was because a pop sensation does not suddenly die everyday, especially under vague circumstances involving perscription drugs and a shady personal physican. The media had been covering the war extensively for roughly eight years, so it somehwat understandable that it took advantage of what was genuinely a huge story such as Michael Jackson's death and devoted a significant amount of text to it. It is unfortunate that Michael Jackson died, and it is even more unfortunate that hostilities in the Middle East have continued for as long as they have without a tangable end in sight....
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