Reading in an Age of Change
UPDATE: My Overland piece is now available online.
There has been a bit if hype recently – some of it self interested – about whether the iPad and other e-readers will be game changers and saviours of media business models. Newspaper managements are naturally hoping that people will pay for content delivered to mobile devices. Rupert Murdoch and his troops are particularly hopeful, since they have stuck their necks out furthest in proclaiming a new era of paywalls.
Like most people, I can’t pretend to know what is going to happen for sure, but I suspect that the e-readers will merely speed up existing trends, rather than changing rules of the game. And the existing trends? More niche media targetting smaller interest groups, and more interaction between content providers and audience members. All this implies a more intense connection between audiences and media outlets, which may mean a greater preparedness to pay for some kinds of content – if it is good enough, and if it can’t be easily obtained elsewhere.
But I very much doubt that large numbers of people will pay for newspapers on the iPad if all they offer is commodotised news that is also freely available elsewhere.
In a deeper sense, though, I do think the nature of reading is changing as a result of technology. I have reflected at this at length in the current issue of Overland magazine, which in conjunction with Meanjin is running a series of pieces on reading in a time of change.
My piece isn’t available online, sadly (irony). [UPDATE: Yes it is.] You will have to fork out for the mag if you want to read it. But there is a blog associated with the joint Meanjin/Overland venture.
To summarise I agree that this will be the year in which e-readers become mainstream, and soon much of our reading will be done on such devices. Books will become “special” objects, rather than utilitarian.
But more significantly, I think the nature of privacy is changing, and that in the future creativity will be seen as residing, not so much in individuals as in the communities that gather around reading and writing.
And I fear that we will lose some of our dark, quiet and private spaces.
Yet at the same time, there is so much to gain.
At the dawn of mass literacy, people worried about whether human beings would lose their ability to remember information. They probably did become less adept at this. Yet who would say that literacy, and the printing press, and all that followed, have been bad things?
We are living through an equivalent change, which is both frightening and exciting.
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Margaret, i am in taiwan, reading this online and printed out your very good essay in Meanjins. Well said. One thing, nobody seems to be talking about this and i feel it is very important: maybe you blog about this one day, your POV and allow me to do a guest blog here one day, and it is about this: I feel, as a longtime blogger, writer, editor, teacher, READER, that reading on paper is very different from reading on screens, so different that I believe we need a new word for this new kind of reading mode, and i have no idea what the word will be, but for now i am calling it “screening” and I also have a strong hunch that future MRI scans fo the brain will show that reading on paper lights up different parts of the brain compared to when we read on screens, er, that is, when we “screen’ text off screens, and that these diferecnes will be shown to be for retention of the info, processing of the info, analysis of the info and critical thinking ABOUT the info. I am in touch with 25 top reading and education and tech experts worldwide on this, including the pioneering Anne Mangen in Norway and Dr Maryanne Wolf at Tufts in Boston and severael top researchers at UCLA medical school in California. I beleive that future MRI scans will prove my hunch correct, that reading on paper is SUPERIOR to reading off screens, er, screening, for retention, processing, analysis, etc. and that we NEED TO STUDY all this MORE and MORE before we commit to a future where reading on paper is a rare thing and reading off screens, er, screening, is what most people do. Screening is NOT reading. It is more akin to scanning or skimming. I am sure you agree with me. SMILE. Can you write about this? can you let me guest blog about this. Can Meanjins let me do an essay on this? And may i interview YOU for my blog in Taiwan 10 qusetions by email about all this, your POV, pro or con and in between? Can do? Email me off line at danbloom at GMAIL dot com….. – loved your essay, loved the story of your son, turning the pages, loved the last graf re your dad and grandson…..tears in my eyes as i read the print out at home
QUESTION: why is no one talking about my ideas about paper reading vs screening? The major newspaeprs in US and OZ refuse to accept my opeds on this. Not one reporter will interview me, not pro or con? Why the silence, why the fear? I am telling the truth. I am on the soemthing here. If we build a future based soley on screen-reading, civilization as a whole will suffer. That’s my theme. Agree?
The nature of reading is changing right before our very eyes: screening-reading is not really “reading” but a new mode of human reading called “screening”
The nature of reading is changing right before our very eyes
by Danny Bloom
OPED COMMENTARY to be read on paper or off a screen
NEW YORK — Do we read differently on the computer screen from how we
read on the
printed page? The answer, of course, is yes. But just how different
and what it means are issues that need further study.
Anne Mangen, a reading specialist at the
University of Stavanger in Norway,is one of the leading researchers
concerned with these differences.
In an academic paper published in the Journal of Research on Reading in
December of 2008, Mangen listed a few reasons that reading on paper
and reading on a screen are different from each other. According to her
research, and in her opinion:.
* Reading on a screen is not as rewarding — or effective — as
reading printed words on paper. MRI brain scans are showing this as proof.
* The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical
manipulation of the
computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and
appreciate what we’re reading.
* Online text moves up and down the
screen and lacks physical dimension, robbing us of a feeling of
completeness.
* The visual happenings on a compter screen and our physical interaction
with the entire device and its set ip can be distracting. All of these
things
tax human cognition and concentration in a way that a book or
newspaper or magazine does not.
* The experience of reading a book or a newspaper or a magazine on paper is
both a story experience and a tactile one.
When I asked Mim Harrison, a book editor in Florida, about this, she
said: “I find the
differences between reading on paper and reading on a screen to be
intriguing, and it
certainly gives one pause to consider just what it is we’re doing
with our eyeballs these days.”
The experience of reading on a screen is fundamentally different from
reading
on paper,” a leading futurist and cultural forecaster in California
told me, adding: “Not a priori worse or better; just
different.”Mangen’s research, and the work of other people, too, are
important in terms of drawing people’s attention to the vast literary
shift about to wash over us.”
Bill Hill, a former Microsoft web designer from Scotland who is
still based in the Seattle area, told me that one reason that reading
on screens is still a bit problematical is because “we are still
paying the price of an engineering shortcut taken sixteen years ago.”
Say that again? HIll continued: “Sixteen
years ago, when the programmers at the NSCA were creating Mosaic, the
first Web browser, they made an engineering decision based on
expediency. They took an easy option — for which we’re all still
paying a huge price in terms of the readability of the Web.”
They opted for scrolling, Hill said.Big mistake!
“Type, and layout, has evolved over the 5,500 years since writing
systems first appeared,” Hill says, “and especially since the
widespread adoption of Gutenberg’s moveable metal type — to optimize
for the way human vision works. Sure, you can learn to make do with
scrolling to read, if there’s nothing better. And there’s no choice on
the Web today. And that’s what we need to fix to make reading — and design
–
first-class citizens on the Web.”
Reading on paper will be with us for a long time to come, most experts
believe,
but reading on screens is changing the way we experience “reading” as well.
What
these differences mean is still poorly understood and needs to be studied
by
reading specialists, Web readability experts and technology gurus.
Reading will always be reading. But it’s changing right before our
very eyes as well. I am beginning to call reading off screens (screen-reading) as
“screening”, to coin a new term [with earlier multiple meanings].
Do you prefer reading or screening? Notice any differences in terms
of retention, processing, analysis and critical thinking? Join the club.
Reading on screens is NOT reading.
————————-
Danny Bloom is a freelancer writer and blogger
with a special interest in the future of reading.
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