Preparing for the Next Generation

My apologies in advance for the shorter-than-usual blog post this week. Today was my thirtieth birthday, so I've had a rather busy weekend. Perhaps not surprisingly, the article from this week's lineup that interested me the most was "Preparing for the Next Generation" by Alan J. Porter. This article was not interesting so much because of its convenient brevity (though this was very nice!), but because it discusses an issue which is very topical. On page 20, Porter relates a story of observing his daughter conduct research on Pearl Harbor. He describes how she uses the internet and sites like Wikipedia to find information, as well as online chat applications and other social media to gather the needed information. This part in particular jumped out at me because I've been thinking more and more lately how technology today is almost eliminating the concept of linear thinking. Because books seem to be taking a backseat (in a lot of areas) to more technological means of obtaining knowledge, the need to see the information in a linear fashion (i.e. reading each line of text) seems to be becoming obsolete. By comparison, the internet (including sites like Wikipedia) arrange text in such a way as to facilitate a quicker mode of "reading." I'm not sure that most people looking for information on Wikipedia read the entire article(s), but rather skim, or even jump to the section that contains the needed information. Many sites are set up in this way.

So the question I pose is this: Is technology inadvertently making it more difficult for people to read books?

(Sorry for the lack of comment on the "Wired Bodies in the Wireless Classroom" article. I read it twice over the past few days and still am trying to wrap my mind around it!)