Mike English's blog

Yesterday, Dr. Peter B. Reiner at The National Core for Neuroethics (an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to tackling the ethical, legal, policy and social implications of frontier technological developments in the neurosciences) commented¹ on one of the points Nicholas Carr makes in The Shallows. In the book², Carr notes some recent studies that have shown a difference in the way people read text with hyperlinks versus the way people read text without hyperlinks. Simply put, hyperlinks are distracting. Internet use promotes a multitasking mindset that is changing the way our brains are wired, and hyperlinks are fundamental to this enabling infrastructure.

Reiner writes:

The neuroethical concern is not just that the hyperlinked world in which we live is changing our brains, because every encounter that we have with the environment around us changes our brains (members of the Core, as well as my wife, will be rolling their eyes about now, thinking “Peter always says that”. But it happens to be true. Even reading this blog post, in some way, is changing your brain.) The nub of the issue is this: there is an important distinction between encounters which change the informational content of your brain and those that change the way your brain processes information. Most importantly, these changes are going on without anyone having intended them to come into being. Young children are growing up in an environment in which multitasking is the norm and not the exception, and we are still unsure of the effects. We put more effort into insuring the safety of toys than we have of the way that people read on the internet. This might be imprudent.

I have considered using a combination of footnotes and hyperlinks in my blog posts due to similar concerns—in fact, I’m experimenting with one format in this post—but I worry about losing machine-readable content. Is there a semantic web solution that would allow the hyperlinking data to be accessible to crawlers in the appropriate context while also preventing the hyperlinks from distracting readers? Is there an existing ontology that could be used to add invisible metadata to traditional footnotes? How do you link a semantically rich bibliographic entry to its reference within the text? Might COinS work? Bibliographic footnotes could be encapsulated in a span containing an OpenURL description of the item, but could processing agents link the footnote anchor to its reference within the text? What is the value of that contextual information anyways?

1. Peter B. Reiner, “Hyperlinks,” Neuroethics at the Core, http://neuroethicscanada.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/hyperlinks/
2. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).