Depending on who you listen to, the Internet is either very good or very bad for reading. In the USA, Steven Johnson, the author of Everything Bad is good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter recently took the National Endowment for the Arts to task for its downbeat assessment of reading in the US in its report To Read or Not to Read.[1] Are teenagers reading less or just different stuff online? Certainly the UK National Year of Reading 2008 report Read Up: Fed Up: Exploring Teenage Reading Habits in the UK Today found the top four ‘most loved reads’ were all online, with computer-game cheats at number three.[2] But is reading online the same as reading a book? The CIBER report Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (11 January 2008)[3] cites evidence of new ways of reading emerging online: students getting better at parallel processing (multi-tasking) but worse at sequential processing (reading and evaluating stuff). It talks about the development of power browsing, a hypertextual form of reading, characterized by shallow ‘flicking’ behaviour. ‘Power browsing and viewing appear to be the norm for all. The popularity of abstracts among older researchers rather gives the game away. Society is dumbing down.’[4]
Is a new form of reading emerging online? And if there is, how effective will ‘power browsing’ be for students grappling with complex texts and documentary-based study? We all employ different reading strategies for different things. We ‘scan’ the Yellow Pages for information, we ‘skim’ the newspaper, we practice ‘intensive reading’ prior to a test. But the ability to choose and switch reading strategies ‘distinguishes effective from less effective readers.’[5] Wray and Lewis have highlighted the need for primary school teachers to help children read different kinds of material in different kinds of ways. Is the Internet making it imperative that we think in these terms at university?
Given all this, what of the headlong rush to shift library resources online in the form of e-books? Has anyone ever read an entire monograph online? Maybe the e-book reader revolution is just around the corner, e-paper delivering the satisfying ‘book like‘ experience?[6] Xerox PARC research teams have developed speed readers incorporating dynamic text, its flow rate controlled by the reader, the text morphable onto any surface.[7] Welcome to the world of WalkIn Comix.
WalkIn Comix is a graphic novel you can literally walk into -- it's printed on the walls, floor, and ceiling of a small set of labyrinthine rooms we built at the Tech. Talk about getting immersed in a book...
The story tells the adventures of five teenagers who literally get lost in a world of text and can only find their way out by learning to read it. The exhibit's maze-like structure reflects the story's twists and turns.
Does this level of interactivity add to the experience of reading? Or does hypertextuality and dynamic text do something fundamental to reading that means we should resist the rush to digital?
Given that there is evidence that reading is shifting online and away from books in secondary cohorts, should we be encouraging reading at university with book and journal clubs? Can we make reading more interesting? Is the privatized notion that reading is something you do on your own, in your head, just historically contingent? The collective reading of newspapers, political, satirical and philosophical texts in coffee houses and salons was at the core of the European Enlightenment. Do we need to recover some sense of reading as an exciting and social activity?
[1] Johnson, Steven, ‘Dawn of the digital natives’, The Guardian, Thursday 7 February 2008, Technology Guardian 1-2.
Iyengar, Sunil & Bauerlein, mark, ‘Response: There is good reason to be worried about declining rates of reading’, The Guardian, Wednesday 20 February 2008, 31.
[2] Brown, Mark, ‘Celebrity scandal and Anne frank: the reading diary of British teenagers’, The Guardian, Thursday 27 March 2008, 11.
[3] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/research/ciber/downloads/ggexecutive.pdf Accessed 20.03.08
[4] Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (11 January 2008) 19
[5] Wray, David & Lewis, Maureen, ‘Extending interactions with non-fiction texts: An exit into understanding’, http://www.warwick.ac.uk/staff/D.J.Wray/exel/exit.html Accessed 17 April 2008
[6] http://www.tfot.info/articles/1013/cybook-gen3-e-book-review.html Accessed 5 may 2008
http://www.tfot.info/articles/1000/the-future-of-electronic-paper.html Accessed 5 May 2008
[7] Back, M., Cohen, J., Harrison, S. & Minneman, S., ‘Speed Reader: an experiment in the future of reading’, Computers & Graphics, Vol. 26, Issue 4, August 2002, 623-627.
