Did I really read them?
It's a well known freshman philsophy type argument: People
don't read web pages, and I am people. Therefore, I don't read web pages.
Who knows, as far as it goes it may even be true. Way back then, when you
could still legitimately skim an article without making people wonder whether
you really knew how to read, people tended to believe you if you said you'd
read an article (and wanted to use it in your bibliography). That didn't
mean it was true back then, but people tended to accept as a given that
you knew how to read and that you used that skill with some frequency.
To tell the truth, one of the articles I read straight through, while
the other (non-web) one I skimmed once, read a paragraph here and there
on my second go through, and then finally decided that if I was going to
refer to it I'd better read the whole thing from start to finish. Not that
it makes much difference. My guess is that a good percentage of articles
cited in college term papers earned their footnotes without receiving even
a cusory glance.
Go to: Reading ... and the web lifestyle