People used to read 500 page books on compilers. Would you read an equivalently long blog article on compilers?
With the Internet we've gained the ability to more readily acquire knowledge in little bits at a time, over a lot of areas. But most of us are incapable of reading a really huge article in depth. And thus we get more shallow levels of understanding, but across a wider range of topics. This explains a lot of arguments on the internet.
> But most of us are incapable of reading a really huge article in depth
It's not a "capability", it's a skill. The problem is it's becoming less and less important in everyday life for most people, which in turn makes them abandon its training. As with most skills, without training you become worse at it with time.
I'm not sure if that's good or bad thing that you can now learn without having mastered this skill. Is the understanding you gain via lots of small chunks of knowledge worse than the one you get from reading The Dragon Book? I don't know; looks like a good topic for research in cognitive science.
Personally I do like reading long and involved texts, but I too learned to enjoy it before the Internet became popular. I don't know if I'd be equally interested in such texts had I started just a few years later.
People used to read 500 page books on compilers. Would you read an equivalently long blog article on compilers?
With the Internet we've gained the ability to more readily acquire knowledge in little bits at a time, over a lot of areas. But most of us are incapable of reading a really huge article in depth. And thus we get more shallow levels of understanding, but across a wider range of topics. This explains a lot of arguments on the internet.