What changes when science news goes online?

One of the things that might not immediately strike you as you peruse this column is that the electronic place where you are viewing it might influence how you understand what is written here, how you read it — and maybe how you think in general.

The basis for my rumination on this is the fact that one of the columns I wrote here recently won an award for an internet-mounted science story which, according to the award givers, "uses the creative potential of the medium."

This caused me to go back and look at the piece. Aside from some angry e-mails at the end, looked remarkably like the newspaper and magazine writing I had done for decades. What exactly, I murmured to myself, is the creative potential of the internet?

And that led me in short order to try to figure out what might be different about all journalism, but particularly science journalism, after it is mounted on the internet.

The simple answer: A lot.

Consider the speed and accuracy of reading on the net. One U.S. study has suggested that reading on a computer is about 20 per cent slower than reading the same thing on a printed page — as well as more error filled.

Another morsel of research suggests that part of this may be due to the fact that reading on a printed page involves just reading. On a computer you need a mouse to scroll down a page, and mousing is inherently distracting.

A study two years ago by Jan H. Spyridakis Laura D. Schultz Alexandra L. Bartell, called Studies of Print Versus Online Media, found that the more subheads — those little inserts that break up the flow of story texts — the less internet readers understood the meaning of a story.

On the other hand, maybe people read more on the internet.

A recent study by the Poynter Institute in Florida — it's sort of like the Harvard of modern journalism education — indicated that 77 per cent of a news story's text was read when online versus 62 per cent in a broadsheet newspaper and 57 per cent in a tabloid.

And there was even a greater number when it comes to completion. Roughly 63 per cent of the online news stories were read to the end, versus 40 per cent in a broadsheet and 30 per cent in a tabloid.

But the bigger issue is that maybe people are starting to read differently on the net.

A standard print or magazine article has a beginning, middle and end. Again, the aforementioned Poynter study says that 75 per cent of print readers read from the beginning of an article to end. On the web, half the readers in the report — we are talking about a survey of 600 people — read from beginning to end and half scanned the stories (i.e. jumped around reading bits and pieces).

Even more interesting was the observation that the people who showed the greatest comprehension of a science article about bird-borne illnesses were those who read it in a form that wasn't traditionally structured. Rather, the story was built up in pieces with sidebars, jumps and the famous (or maybe that should be infamous) hyperlinks.

The notion emerging here is that the linearity of thought assumed in the normal print presentation of information — a fancy way for referring to the aforementioned beginning, middle and end — may not apply to an internet-attuned mind.

Maybe all of us 21st century humans are beginning to perceive our world in a web-like way.

What this might mean to our brains was reflected in a Brazilian study of a couple of years ago, which found that when the same information moved from a print to an internet format — replete with hyperlinks and streaming video — people in the study felt their mental information load had doubled.

Thus, maybe reading too many things on the net gives us an achy brain.

But nothing I have read suggests any of these findings are set in mental concrete. We haven't yet fully understood the difference between trying to adjust to a new medium and what is absolutely intrinsic in that medium itself. We can't yet say that an internet science piece like this one, which doesn't have hyperlinks, is equivalent to a non-fiction book without an index, table of contents and footnotes.

What I can say as a writer is that some of the internet's creative potential I love — and some I fear.

Hyperlinks are very evocative, but they quite bother me as I am not sure whether tons of them littering a piece will effectively send my readers riding off in all directions. For instance, a recent New York Times column by Frank Rich had 33 hyperlinks in it. I went to three of them and found they were about 1,000 words long each. That meant if you went to all of them, the 1,500-word Rich piece would have led you to 33,000 additional words of reading about some very different things — articles which themselves were full of hyperlinks.

This is not just the direction of information overload; this is the path toward information insanity. So, more or less, count me out of deep hyper-linkage.

On the other hand I love the ease of correcting mistakes. The traditional correction model was based on the notion that when something was published in print it was effectively there forever, and a post-publication "our correction" or "our mistake" was the best you could do. In the print world, if a writer made an elementary but simple-to-fix error — say, about which atomic particles combine to produce the isotope number in carbon 14 — you got hammered by readers taking glee in knowing more than you did.

Since internet articles are effectively reprinted every time anyone logs on to them, now errors get republished every minute. This has led to the Wikipedia model for mistake correction, which says: If something is wrong, don't agonize, just fix it. Not only do I like that, but unless some mistake was absolutely catastrophic in its original form, I don't see why anyone would oppose it.

For example, the Poynter Institute study quoted above had the following addenda.

"EDITOR'S NOTE: This text has been edited to reflect changes in the findings. Similar changes have been made to the presentation video.

CORRECTION: In the section above regarding alternative or unconventional story forms, the percentage increase in visual attention for broadsheet was incorrect."

But there was no indication of what was corrected. Mistakes have been made. Mistakes have been fixed. Period.

Because there is continual republication I also wonder whether I should be writing differently, including in my prose what I think might be search term phrases future readers might use in a search engine like Google. In terms of subsequent publication, "how" I say something may be almost as important as what I say. Not sure what to do here, but I am thinking about it.

But I am not thinking about writing in a jump-around, no start, no finish manner, no matter how much better that is at imparting information.

Part of it is who I am and my life writing experience, and part of it is my deep identification with an old joke. Why don't cannibals eat clowns, it asks. Answer: Because they taste funny.

Internet science writing without formal structure tastes worse than funny to me: it tastes rancid.