Now that the internet gives me an almost infinite number of alternatives, I have insufficient patience to read such a tome again. Is that an improvement?

Not for Mr. Toffler. But it works for me.

1. Meta-reading: We’ve never had the opportunity to rapidly course through vast amounts of information, guided by efficient associational links in left and right-brained ways. This is a new kind of thinking that may in some cases add more value than the opportunity cost of people not doing as much scuba-dive reading, to use Carr’s term. I’ve myself experienced moments of StumbleUpon epiphany as ideas come together suddenly due to the parade of related ‘jigsaw piece’ stimuli. Certainly not the use case the authors of the individual pieces intended (or appreciate), but value delivered nevertheless.

2. The 80-20 argument: A lot of end-to-end reading in the past was motivated by having little better to do. Much as authors like to think their every word is sparklingly original, it is actually possible to extract 80% of the value of most articles by cherrypicking 20% of the substance. It could be a different 80-20 for every reader.

3. A New Kind of Writing — the Buffet: You can recognize point 2 as a writer, and actively write to support that mode of cognition (it is harder to intentionally support meta-reading as a writer, but I have some ideas there too, for later). Make it easy for people to access your thinking, offered up in lego-block format.

4. The Art of the High Concept: One unambiguously good effect the Web has had , through its viral dynamics, is to cultivate in writers a fantastically sophisticated sense of design and efficient communication. Dan Pink really gets this (Whole New Mind, Johnny Bunko etc.)Ten years ago, this piece would have taken me 1000 pedantic words to articulate. Today, I’ve slowly learned the craft so I can have the same impact on my intended reader with a single graphic as stimulus. Maybe the sophisticated non-fiction comic book is the medium of the 21st century, and will add more value in 1 century than the novel did in 3? Who knows?

5. Better reactive/opportunistic thinking: Yes, perhaps our capacity for deliberative thought has diminished, but undeniably, our capacity for rapid reactive and opportunistic thought has increased.

6. Maybe information overload isn’t: The ‘attention economy’ framing is tired, and Herbert Simon possibly got it half-wrong. There are ways to think about attention that undermines the apparently axiomatic status of the ‘information overload’ assertion.