Bergen and a Kansas State journalism colleague, Tom Grimes, along with a researcher named Deborah Potter, designed a study in which students were asked to watch a set of stories from "CNN Headline News." Half the time the crawl was at the bottom; the other half it was edited out. What the professors found was that students watching the show with the crawl remembered about 10 percent fewer facts than those who watched without it. To Bergen, it was more than a personal vindication. It challenged the notion, trumpeted by media executives like the former Time Warner C.O.O. Robert Pittman, that today's young people somehow absorb information differently than previous generations did. Learning by constantly nibbling at bits and bites from multiple sources at once - what people in the business and computer worlds call "multitasking" - just doesn't work well. It makes you only more distracted, less effective.

New York Times: "The Crawl" Makes You Stupid.