As the Internet has become more and more popular, we may be reading a great deal more than we used to. However, the way we are reading materials on the Internet, or online reading, is very different from the way we traditionally read printed materials.

In the traditional way of reading, we would start at the beginning of a book and read through to the end. In online reading, in contrast, we start reading a page, but may never finish it because a link on that page leads us to a passage on a different page, and so on. As we go from one page to another, we have to remember lots of different ideas at the same time. This new way of reading is quite different from the traditional one.

There are both advantages and disadvantages of online reading. In online reading, the brain gets better than ever at doing many tasks at the same time, or multitasking; and thanks to this, we can work quickly and think creatively. Multitasking is useful in certain working environments, but it also makes it more difficult for us to read at a deep level. We are, therefore, much less likely to analyse what we read in a [passage truncated at this point on supplied page 4; continuation not supplied in question pages]