Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner's 2011 Science article--a SHORT one!--was the first to publicly demonstrate Google's cyborg-like infiltration of its users' normal memory structures.  Though some of the study's methods have been criticized, as scientists are supposed to do, research published recently extends the potential cognitive effects Google has on its users' self-perceptions of how much they know:  M. Fisher, M. Goddu, and F. Kiel, "Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge,"  Journal of Experimental Psychology 144:3 (2015) 674-87: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-0000070.pdf  Print literacy made similar, subtle and gross changes in C15-20 readers' cognition and personality, all the way down to brain structures.  So this "Google effect" is not unique, but literacy is subtle stuff!  Do not underestimate what changes in its technology might do to, and for, us.  Once again, if you are interested in a midterm paper studying these kinds of phenomena, which merge cyberspace and our interior mental worlds, Ben Smith's Traffic(see above) will offer insights.  Specifically, look for the process by which Facebook, Buzzfeed, and Gawker boosted "traffic" (clicks, unique page views, etc.) by using algorithms that fed users pages containing more of what they already had indicated an interest in.  See also Sean Parker's famous interview comment about Facebook and other social media designers deliberately "hacking" a weakness in human beings' cognitive design to hijack our attention, memory, and self-image (the "dopamine hits").  The neural feedback loops in social media became especially dangerous in 2018 when Facebook launched a new algorithm that attempted to measure "meaningful social engagement" resulted in "giving people what they would react most strongly to . . . [resulting in] a nation that was alternately angry and horrified, and uniquely preoccupied with fighting on Facebook about race" (275).

        We will encounter similar psychological effects of mass media reading when we get to print text.  For instance, since Nathaniel Butter and associates founded the first English "news-paper" in 1620-21, English readers increasingly came to base their sense of community and global conditions on what they read in these weekly, then daily broadsheets.  Journalism was an early print-based medium that shaped readers' consiousnesses, and its methods are correspondingly highly conventionalized to procide reliable content of a given quality and substance.  Few Goucher students take the newswriting course these days, but at least (in its current form as COM 142) a practicing journalist teaches the course.  COM 142 is primarily a skills course, but COM 105 and 334 teach analysis and history of media in general and journalism in particular.  To grasp the imperatives guiding print-based news reporting, as opposed to many of the "aggregators" and "click-bait" sites Massing covers in his first survey (June 4), consider this ancient maxim countless editors have told novice reporters: "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out."  Accuracy and patient research compete with the pressure of writing on a deadline to produce extraordinary demands on reporters' abilities.  For a pithy (short) but well-informed set of journalistic sayings and explanations of their significance, see Craig Silverman's "Eight Simple Rules for Doing Journalism," Columbia Journalism Review, September 16, 2011--be sure to read all the way to the bottom for a great "Correction" to his own article.  One thing Massing did not really investigate in his survey of digital journalism was whether any of those sites offered such corrections to errors of fact and omission made in previous reports.  All serious print newspapers admit their mistakes in print--see the upper left corner of page A2 of every Washington Post for examples.  For students who have never read Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men (1974) or seen Alan Pakula's quite accurate film version (1976), this weekend might be a good time to experience the reporters' exhausting and dangerous search for truth.