Does the web change reading habits?

How the Web changes your reading habits | csmonitor.com Computers and the Internet are changing the way people read. Thus far, search engines and hyperlinks, those underlined words or phrases that when clicked take you to a new Web page, have turned the online literary voyage into a kind of U-pick island-hop.

In grad school I read Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, which is about how the technology of writing changed how we perceive the world. It created written history, different from oral history. It codified dialects into languages. Writing made it possible for news to spread far and wide. I've written about it here before, but it's a good book to read to understand how technology (not information technology, just the mechanization of things) can impact how we communicate, interact with and understand the world.