Hi Dan,
Daniel Emory wrote:
It’s estimated that 40% of the US adult population is non-literate,
which means they don’t read books or newspapers. This has been
accompanied by a rapid decline in the ability of college students to
write a half-way decent paragraph in English. The California State
College system, the largest in the nation, takes almost any applicant
who got through high-school degree with half-way decent grades. But
about 40% of its first year students are not capable of doing
college-level work, and thus their first year is dominated by
remedial classes in English, Math and other subjects they should have
mastered in high school.
These declines all coincide with the growth of the internet, and the
shift from obtaining knowledge from paper books to learning from
feeble snippets of on-line text. The blogosphere, dominated by those
who are at least competent in the English language, consists mainly
of opinions unsupported by any factual basis.
Although I feel that what you are saying may well have merit, I'm
reluctant to jump to any conclusions too quickly. A favourite example of
misdirected causality is the inexplicable reduction in crime for young
males in New York city. Politicians claimed for years that it was due to
their "tough on crime" policy, yet the drop surpassed that of cities
with similar policies. Eventually someone figured out that it coincided
with abortion being made more freely available - less children being
born into poor homes where they weren't wanted translated into fewer
boys thinking crime was the way up and girls thinking pregnancy was. Of
course it's not conclusive, but it's as plausible as the mismatched
"tough on crime" line...
There could be an element of that in your reasoning, I feel. Whether
information is to be delivered on paper or on screen doesn't predispose
it to being written at a certain level of quality. Whether it's being
delivered electronically or on paper, there will *always* be a need for
people who are able to write clearly. Some information is too critical
to risk misinterpretation.
It's certainly true that there's a lot of poor writing on the internet,
but that's partly because there's so much information. Take this posting
as a case in point - I don't claim to write with any particular
proficiency, but you're reading it because it landed in your email. Had
it not, it's extremely unlikely that we'd be exchanging letters about
this topic, if for no other reason than the fact that we didn't realise
the other was interested in it.
When you read tomes from the 1990’s extolling the promise of
hypertext to change the way people think and use information, (I
recommend the “Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook by Berk and Devlin), you
begin to realize that it’s promise was still-born. The hypertext
pioneers envisioned a rich panoply of link types that would create
hypertexts which were true “searchable mazes” Frame Technology,
beginning in FrameMaker 4, added a rich variety of hypertext link
types which would have realized that original vision.
True, but linking is difficult. It's easy if the ends of all of the
links reside in your domain, but how do you know if the point within a
document owned by someone else still means what it did when you first
pointed at it? It's tough enough for a link to even know whether the
document still exists, let alone how it might degrade gracefully to
another resource, how to determine the impact of the missing link on the
viability of the rest of the document, etc. It's still relatively early
days and linking is one of the key components of a rich internet, so
it's getting plenty of attention.
When Adobe took over FrameMaker, it could have carried out that
vision by implementing all of the FrameMaker link types in PDF. It
failed to do so. And so, the HTML standard, with only the most
primitive hypertext link type, became the standard. There was some
hope that the XML standard would have rich linking capabilities. It
added a few additional link types, but nowhere near enough to realize
the original promise of hypertext.
You certainly could be on to something with that - one of the ways that
FrameMaker could be kept relevant would be to concentrate heavily on
linking, including to documents outside of the current book. PDF would
provide a great platform for that - it might even be enough to increase
the use of PDF on the internet. (They'd want to make loading a PDF
quicker and less obvious first though.)
Getting back to what I state in the first two paragraphs above, I
maintain that the ability to acquire in-depth knowledge of a subject
is a discipline which is difficult to master. And I have no doubt
that well-written, well-organized paper books, particularly on
difficult subjects, will continue to be the best way to acquire real,
in-depth knowledge of a subject, and subsequently serve its owner as
a valuable reference source.
In-depth knowledge isn't always desirable - the rapid growth of the
internet is proof of that. If it was always desirable, the internet
would not be as valuable a resource as it is, as it wouldn't satisfy
people's requirements for the reasons that you cite.
That said though, there is truth to what you say - the real question is
whether it matters. In my parent's day, neat cursive handwriting was
very important. It was arguably less important in my day and for my
daughter, it will be of little importance, as in her life, she will
unquestionably use a keyboard or some other device far more than she
ever writes with a ballpoint. The same is true of mathematics - you can
do complex calculation on your phone now, so it's not critical that you
understand logarithmic tables and the like. I don't think that it's
better or worse, just different.
Marcus
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