I believe that multimedia, hyperlinks and interactivity can help create a deeper understanding of whatever topic one chooses to study. However, I can see how these could be viewed as distracting and take you out of deep attention mode. Personally, I prefer to read alone in a quiet area free of distractions. But then when it’s time to write, I prefer to have ambient background music on. I’ve also learned a lot from screen readings. Having the option to view examples from the text in an interactive way has helped me understand certain material faster than traditional reading. I think that both screen reading and traditional reading have their benefits and should be utilized in a way where both deep attention and hyper attention can exist.
“Each cognitive mode has advantages and limitations. Deep attention is superb for solving complex problems represented in a single medium, but it comes at the price of environmental alertness and flexibility of response. Hyper attention excels at negotiating rapidly changing environments in which multiple foci compete for attention; its disadvantage is impatience with focusing for long periods on a non-interactive object”