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The way that the Internet is designed—not graphic design, but overall habits and architecture—encourages the widespread distractability that I, at least, hate.

I learned it from Nicholas Carr

Interconnectivity: information that is of some inherent public interest is typically marinated in meta-information: (a) is bathed in (b). It is not enough to make the inherently interesting content instantly available and easy to find; it must also be surrounded by links, sidebars, menus, and other info, and promoted on social media via mail. This is deliberate, but it has gotten worse in the last ten years or so, with the advent of syndicated blog feeds (RSS), then various other social media feeds. This is, of course, supposed to be for the convenience and enlightenment of the user, and no doubt sometimes it is. But I think it usually doesn’t help anybody, except maybe people who are trying to build web traffic. Recency: the information to be most loudly announced online is not just recent, but the brand-spanking-newest, and what allegedly deserves our attention now is determined democratically, with special weight given to the opinions of people we know.