The Changing Mentality of the Reader

Hunting for information and research on the difference between page reading and screen reading, was in and of itself an example of both the brilliant advantages of the internet as well as its labyrinthine experience.

Many of the studies that I easily found were for the early to mid 1990s, as people were just beginning to work off their computer monitors, and the internet was still somewhat a place that you could get to the end of. Twenty year later, with the advent of the tablet devices and e-readers the question is still a relevant one, but the focused has shifted from whether it’s a good idea to read on the screen to how this electronic reading is changing the way we think, and to what we comprehend.

The best article I found on the topic was an editorial piece from the New York Times. There were five contributors, all with incredibly difference backgrounds, education, current research, and each with a different focus on the issue of electronic reading. I want to highlight on a couple and then show the neural roads-less-traveled that I went on as the reader of this article.

Alan Liu, a professor of English and head of Transliteracies, a research group on the nature of online reading, information culture, and literature, focuses on the social aspect that reading online produces. While it can be considered “distracting,” he writes that

"Initially, any new information medium seems to degrade reading because it disturbs the balance between focal and peripheral attention. This was true as early as the invention of writing, which Plato complained hollowed out focal memory. Similarly, William Wordsworth’s sister complained that he wasted his mind in the newspapers of the day. It takes time and adaptation before a balance can be restored, not just in the “mentality” of the reader, as historians of the book like to say, but in the social systems that complete the reading environment."

I love this idea that Plato thought that writing was going to be bad for the study of philosophy, and that the invention of the newspaper was another doomsday device to the human's intellectual capacity. That's not to say that those inventions didn't change the way that humans interacted with one another, because that is SURELY the case. I find that I actually get my news similarly online, as how I got my news through a paper. I hadn't really thought explicitly about how the newspaper is an entirely different medium of information than a book, and that I get information from it differently (topical, scattered, thesis-sentence only, etc).

Davide Gelernter doesn’t focus on the social interaction that Web 2.0 can have on the book, but rather that a book can now be changed in a meaningful way to help the individual reader.

"I assume that technology will soon start moving in the natural direction: integrating chips into books, not vice versa. I might like to make a book beep when I can’t find it, search its text online, download updates and keep an eye on reviews and discussion. This would all be easily handled by electronics worked into the binding. Such upgraded books acquire some of the bad traits of computer text — but at least, if the circuitry breaks or the battery runs out, I’ve still got a book.

"Of course, onscreen text will change and improve. But the physical side of reading depends not on the bad aspects of computer screens but on the brilliance of the traditional book — sheets bound on end, the “codex” — which remains the most brilliant design of the last several thousand years."

I found a great article on the invention/creation of Gutenberg’s printing press, because I love to use the analogy of the printing press and the mass production of codices to the invention of the internet itself. Certainly, just because the printing press had been invented didn't mean that printers abandoned the earlier technology of writing, or the manuscript, but transformed those tools into something new. The dream that I share with Gelernter is that the book will continue to exist, but perhaps it will be a “Codex 2.0.”

As a child, I was obsessed with Penny’s, Inspector Gadget’s daughter, “computer book.” I often carried around the “H” or the “U” Encyclopedia Brittanica.  How do those two things relate, you might ask. Rightly so, the answer is not obvious. In the “H” encyclopedia, one could find the entry “Human Anatomy” and the “U” Encyclopedia include the entry on the “United States.” Clever book designers had used a handful of transparent sheets in each entry. For anatomy, there was a skeleton sheet, arteries and veins, organs, musculature, and a skin sheet. The “United States” transparencies included the land purchases and development of North America to the present size/state of the United States. I’m still not seeing the connection, you say. Oh right, still not apparent, is it? To an eight year old, these encyclopedias were Penny’s computer book. The transparencies allowed me to change and enter “data,” while my “screen” constantly updated to reflect my queries. It was the best!

Why don’t I have one of those yet?! That was 1988!! No, I’m not buying that my iPad is that thing. I want a tangible book. That I open up. And has pages. A durable, leather cover, lovingly created. Maybe if I tied to iPads together that would get me closer. I love books. I don’t know how many times I’ve said that I want to buy the book, but get a digital copy of the book at the same time. Put a code or a chip in the back! I don’t get why it’s not done.  That’s probably not fair. I know that there are authors who do offer that as an option.  Maybe the technology is on the way. This is a flexible phone/flexible display!  There’s still a chance for me to be Penny!