A study at the University of Valencia has cheered up grumpy Luddites everywhere by concluding that reading printed texts improves comprehension more than reading digital matter does. But they’re not entirely sure why. One theory is that the “linguistic quality of digital texts tends to be lower than that traditionally found in printed texts.” In other words, to mangle McLuhan, it may be about the message rather than the medium; if I print out this blog post, it doesn’t miraculously get better. Or, as techies have asserted since the days of Babbage, garbage in, garbage out.
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