{"id":2848,"date":"2025-01-18T13:13:15","date_gmt":"2025-01-18T13:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?p=2848"},"modified":"2025-01-18T14:15:10","modified_gmt":"2025-01-18T14:15:10","slug":"homo-interneticus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?p=2848","title":{"rendered":"homo interneticus"},"content":{"rendered":"

What a discovery (never mind that it’s been under my nose for years.)! I learned about Michael H. Goldhaber and his contrasting terms homo interneticus<\/em> and homo typographicus<\/em> in the journal The Economist<\/em> just a few days ago. \u00a0In print. \u00a0It was a news item, specifically an observation about the difference between our Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, and the leader of the opposition Tory party, Kemi Badenoch. Differences are not hard to spot: he’s white and she’s black, he’s a socialist and she’s a Thatcherite. But what really matters, the Economist points out, is that he’s typographicus and she’s interneticus.<\/p>\n

Goldhaber’s terms address us as a species, describing a shift of evolutionary proportions in terms that make the turbulence clear. Here I’m trying to scale it down to “us” as writers and readers who use the internet. \u00a0Here’s a short quote from one of Goldhaber’s publications<\/a> (These are not so easy to find.\u00a0 He’s “the internet theorist you’ve never heard of”).<\/p>\n

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For any text to continue to hold our attention on the Internet, it must be calibrated so as to: provide just the right level of excitement to sustain interest; not introduce matters so strange that the reader cannot follow or is tempted to seek explanations on other sites; to present arguments of only moderate complexity \u2014 again not to distract or bore the reader; and gather the reader\u2019s sympathy by presenting materials likely to resonate with her. Opportunities to escape these limitations that might do for a printed work are far more risky in the Internet environment, where attention can quickly stray. Despite the apparent democracy of the Internet, where anyone has an equal chance to create a site or blog, these tight restrictions demand a high degree of talent and ingenuity for success.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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What a discovery (never mind that it’s been under my nose for years.)! I learned about Michael H. Goldhaber and his contrasting terms homo interneticus and homo typographicus in the journal The Economist just...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2849,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"homo typographical and homo interneticus","bgseo_description":"Michael Goldhaber's terms describe a gradual, but species-wide evolutionary shift in a reader's ability and\/or willingness to pay attention to a text. ","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[479,259,291,343,247],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-evolution","category-language","category-post-literacy","category-reading","category-writing"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2848"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2852,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2848\/revisions\/2852"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}