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zero_call comments on Less Wrong: Open Thread, September 2010 - Less Wrong
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In "The Shallows", Nicholas Carr makes a very good argument that replacing deep reading books, with the necessarily shallower reading online or of hypertext in general, causes changes in our brains which makes deep thinking harder and less effective.
Thinking about "The Shallows" later, I realized that laziness and other avoidance behaviors will also tend to become ingrained in your brain, at the expense of your self-direction/self-discipline behaviors they are replacing.
Another problem with the Web, that wasn't discussed in "The Shallows", is that hypertext channels you to the connections the author chooses to present. Wide and deep reading, such that you make the information presented yours, gives you more background knowledge that helps you find your own connections. It is in the creation of your own links within your own mind that information is turned into knowledge.
Carr actually has two other general theses in the book; that neural plasticity to some degree undercuts the more extreme claims of evolutionary psych, which I have some doubts about and am doing further reading on; and he winds up with a pretty silly argument about the implausibility of AI. Fortunately, his main argument about the problems with using hypertext is totally independent of these two.
I haven't read Nicholas Carr, but I've seen summaries of some of the studies used to claim that book reading results in more comprehension than hypertext reading. All the ones I saw are bogus. They all use, for the hypertext reading, a linear extract from a book, broken up into sections separated by links. Sometimes the links are placed in somewhat arbitrary places. Of course a linear text can be read more easily linearly.
I believe hypertext reading is deeper, and that this is obvious, almost true by definition. Non-hypertext reading is exactly 1 layer deep. Hypertext lets the reader go deeper. Literally. You can zoom in on any topic.
A more fair test would be to give students a topic to study, with the same material, but some given books, and some given the book material organized and indexed in a competent way as hypertext.
Hypertext reading lets you find your own connections, and lets you find background knowledge that would otherwise simply be edited out of a book.
Hypertext reading has a strong potential, but it also has negative aspects that you don't have as much with standard books. For example, it's much easier to get distracted or side-tracked with a lot of secondary information that might not even be very important.