The screeny future of newspapers: "All the news you can screen!"
The screeny future of newspapers: "All the news you can screen!"
by Dan E. Bloom
Are you reading this in your print newspaper -- or -- are you screening this online or on your home computer screen? How you answer
this question will determine what the future of newspapers will be.
CONTINUE: MORE:
> Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe on June 19, fired the first
> volley in this now-national
> discussion. "Do we read differently on the computer screen from how we
> read on the
> printed page?" Beam asked rhetorically. His column was headlined by a
> savvy Globe copyeditor: "I screen, you screen, we all screen."
>
> The answer to Beam's question is, of course, yes. From most of the
> research that has come in so
> far from academics in
> North America and Europe, the answer is clear, although not everyone's
> in agreement with what it all means.
>
> For me -- as a veteran author, editor and now a daily blogger hunting
> and pecking my way around the blogosphere -- what the current research
> means is that we need a new word for reading on plastic, pixelated
> screens (PPS).
>
> I have quietly suggested "screening", as Mr. Beam quietly noted in his
> column. Yes, screening has multiple meanings, as everyone and his
> brother has pointed out to me in over 1000 emails this year since the
> brouhaha began. We screen movies, we screen job candidates, we screen
> patients for medical problems, we do a lot of "screening" in this
> world of ours. And now, you will be hearing a lof about a new kind of
> "screening" -- so-called reading on plastic, pixelated screens.
>
> I did some homework. I asked Dr. Anne Mangen at the
> University of Stavanger in Norway what she thought about the word
> "screening" for reading on a screen, she told me by email: "My first
> impression is that the term 'screening' is adequate in some
> respects, but not in others. It's adequate to the extent that it
> points to certain differences in the reading mode which has to do with
> the display nature, the central bias of a screen compared to a page of
> print text (our gaze is naturally oriented towards the center), and
> the image-like character of modalities (we tend to read a screen
> spatially, in contrast to the page which we linearly)."
>
> Dr Mangen, in a published academic paper published in Britain last
> December, listed a few reasons that reading on paper
> and reading on a screen are two very different animals.
>
> * Reading on a screen is not as rewarding -- or effective -- as
> reading printed words on paper.
>
> * 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 is
> both a story experience and a tactile one.
>
> The jury's still out on just how different reading on paper is
> from reading on a screen, but the public discussions in the blogsphere
> are getting interesting -- and heated. But more and more, top experts
> in the computer and Internet fields, as well as typeface designers and
> readability gurus, are in agreement with me that we need a new word
> for reading on screens, and that the word should be "screening." For
> now. A completely new word might come down the information highway in
> the future and take the place of screening. But for now, you screen, I
> screen, we all screen.
>
> I asked Kevin Kelly, the well-respected maverick of Wired magazine,
> what he felt about this
> new word for reading on screens, he told me by email in one short sentence: "I
> would be happy to see screening become a verb (for this)."
>
> Mim Harrison, a book editor in New York, told me: "I find the
> distinction between reading and screening to be intriguing, and it
> certainly gives us all pause to consider just what it is we're doing
> with our eyeballs these days."
>
>
> "Screening, of course, is not a new term," a top expert in predicting
> the future told me in a recent email, but this might just be the
> time that it catches on in the way you suggest. Screening is a clever
> and useful term capturing the fact that the
> experience of reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading
> on paper. Not a priori worse or better; just different."
>
> And then he added this important note: "It is the right word for the
> moment in terms of drawing people's attention to the vast literary
> shift about to wash over us."
>
>
> Another Web philosopher told me: "Keep going in the direcetion you are
> going. Eventually, people will listen to you. Of course, 'screening'
> has multiple meanings already. But your new way of putting it ...is
> very interesting and it provokes thought. I assume that is your
> intention."
>
> When I asked technology reporter John Markoff at the New York Times
> about this idea, he replied in a one-word email note: "Hmmmmmmm."
>
> I asked David Pogue at the New York Times the same question, and he
> said: "Very interesting."
>
> But when I asked a top technology editor at the Times if he could blog
> about this issue, he replied: "You have a noble crusade, sir, but
> we'll will not be writing about this until 'screening' is actually in
> use. You cannot just go out and create a new meaning for an old word.
> Who are you, anyways?"
>
> I told the New York Times editor (Damon Darlin, if you want to know
> his name): "I am just Dan Bloom, tilting at windmills.
> Tufts 1971. A seasoned reader and writer. I've been reading the New
> York Times on paper for over 50 years!"
>
> Bill Hill, a former Microsoft typeface designer from Scotland who is
> now 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."
>
> I asked Mr Hill to explain this to me, and he replied: '' 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."
>
> The engineers asked themselves:"How do we display content?"
>
> They said: "Pagination's hard. The easy way is to display it all in a
> bottomless window, so the reader can scroll through it. Then it
> doesn't matter how much content there is on a Web page."
>
> But according to Mr Hill and most other Web readability experts,
> scrolling is much less suited to the way humans read than paging
> through content.
>
> "The human visual system -- the eyes, the muscles which control them,
> the optic nerve and the brain -- operates like a high-speed,
> high-resolution scanning machine," Mr Hill told me. "When reading, it
> scans four targets per second, taking only 25ms to move from one
> target to the next, each target about 5-7 characters wide."
>
> "Type, and layout, has evolved over the 5500 years since writing
> systems first appeared," Mr Hill continued, "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."
>
> Mr Hill, who believes in the power of printed books and in a rosy
> future for e-books as well, says fixing the Web's readability won't be
> easy, but that it can be done.
>
> "It'll mean re-educating the design community in a new paradigm," he
> said. "But it'll be worth it."
>
> So, Dear Reader, er, Dear Screener, if you have scrolled all the way
> down to the bottom of this seemingly bottonless guest column, let me
> ask you one more time (and your comments and feedback are very welcome
> in the comments section below): Were you reading this commentary, or
> were you screening it?
>
>
>
> -------------------------
>
> Dan Bloom is the author of over a dozen books
> in English, Japanese and Chinese. A freelancer writer and blogger
> based in Taiwan, he does not own a computer and has never even seen a
> Kindle or BlackBerry or an iPhone
by Dan E. Bloom
Are you reading this in your print newspaper -- or -- are you screening this online or on your home computer screen? How you answer
this question will determine what the future of newspapers will be.
CONTINUE: MORE:
> Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe on June 19, fired the first
> volley in this now-national
> discussion. "Do we read differently on the computer screen from how we
> read on the
> printed page?" Beam asked rhetorically. His column was headlined by a
> savvy Globe copyeditor: "I screen, you screen, we all screen."
>
> The answer to Beam's question is, of course, yes. From most of the
> research that has come in so
> far from academics in
> North America and Europe, the answer is clear, although not everyone's
> in agreement with what it all means.
>
> For me -- as a veteran author, editor and now a daily blogger hunting
> and pecking my way around the blogosphere -- what the current research
> means is that we need a new word for reading on plastic, pixelated
> screens (PPS).
>
> I have quietly suggested "screening", as Mr. Beam quietly noted in his
> column. Yes, screening has multiple meanings, as everyone and his
> brother has pointed out to me in over 1000 emails this year since the
> brouhaha began. We screen movies, we screen job candidates, we screen
> patients for medical problems, we do a lot of "screening" in this
> world of ours. And now, you will be hearing a lof about a new kind of
> "screening" -- so-called reading on plastic, pixelated screens.
>
> I did some homework. I asked Dr. Anne Mangen at the
> University of Stavanger in Norway what she thought about the word
> "screening" for reading on a screen, she told me by email: "My first
> impression is that the term 'screening' is adequate in some
> respects, but not in others. It's adequate to the extent that it
> points to certain differences in the reading mode which has to do with
> the display nature, the central bias of a screen compared to a page of
> print text (our gaze is naturally oriented towards the center), and
> the image-like character of modalities (we tend to read a screen
> spatially, in contrast to the page which we linearly)."
>
> Dr Mangen, in a published academic paper published in Britain last
> December, listed a few reasons that reading on paper
> and reading on a screen are two very different animals.
>
> * Reading on a screen is not as rewarding -- or effective -- as
> reading printed words on paper.
>
> * 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 is
> both a story experience and a tactile one.
>
> The jury's still out on just how different reading on paper is
> from reading on a screen, but the public discussions in the blogsphere
> are getting interesting -- and heated. But more and more, top experts
> in the computer and Internet fields, as well as typeface designers and
> readability gurus, are in agreement with me that we need a new word
> for reading on screens, and that the word should be "screening." For
> now. A completely new word might come down the information highway in
> the future and take the place of screening. But for now, you screen, I
> screen, we all screen.
>
> I asked Kevin Kelly, the well-respected maverick of Wired magazine,
> what he felt about this
> new word for reading on screens, he told me by email in one short sentence: "I
> would be happy to see screening become a verb (for this)."
>
> Mim Harrison, a book editor in New York, told me: "I find the
> distinction between reading and screening to be intriguing, and it
> certainly gives us all pause to consider just what it is we're doing
> with our eyeballs these days."
>
>
> "Screening, of course, is not a new term," a top expert in predicting
> the future told me in a recent email, but this might just be the
> time that it catches on in the way you suggest. Screening is a clever
> and useful term capturing the fact that the
> experience of reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading
> on paper. Not a priori worse or better; just different."
>
> And then he added this important note: "It is the right word for the
> moment in terms of drawing people's attention to the vast literary
> shift about to wash over us."
>
>
> Another Web philosopher told me: "Keep going in the direcetion you are
> going. Eventually, people will listen to you. Of course, 'screening'
> has multiple meanings already. But your new way of putting it ...is
> very interesting and it provokes thought. I assume that is your
> intention."
>
> When I asked technology reporter John Markoff at the New York Times
> about this idea, he replied in a one-word email note: "Hmmmmmmm."
>
> I asked David Pogue at the New York Times the same question, and he
> said: "Very interesting."
>
> But when I asked a top technology editor at the Times if he could blog
> about this issue, he replied: "You have a noble crusade, sir, but
> we'll will not be writing about this until 'screening' is actually in
> use. You cannot just go out and create a new meaning for an old word.
> Who are you, anyways?"
>
> I told the New York Times editor (Damon Darlin, if you want to know
> his name): "I am just Dan Bloom, tilting at windmills.
> Tufts 1971. A seasoned reader and writer. I've been reading the New
> York Times on paper for over 50 years!"
>
> Bill Hill, a former Microsoft typeface designer from Scotland who is
> now 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."
>
> I asked Mr Hill to explain this to me, and he replied: '' 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."
>
> The engineers asked themselves:"How do we display content?"
>
> They said: "Pagination's hard. The easy way is to display it all in a
> bottomless window, so the reader can scroll through it. Then it
> doesn't matter how much content there is on a Web page."
>
> But according to Mr Hill and most other Web readability experts,
> scrolling is much less suited to the way humans read than paging
> through content.
>
> "The human visual system -- the eyes, the muscles which control them,
> the optic nerve and the brain -- operates like a high-speed,
> high-resolution scanning machine," Mr Hill told me. "When reading, it
> scans four targets per second, taking only 25ms to move from one
> target to the next, each target about 5-7 characters wide."
>
> "Type, and layout, has evolved over the 5500 years since writing
> systems first appeared," Mr Hill continued, "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."
>
> Mr Hill, who believes in the power of printed books and in a rosy
> future for e-books as well, says fixing the Web's readability won't be
> easy, but that it can be done.
>
> "It'll mean re-educating the design community in a new paradigm," he
> said. "But it'll be worth it."
>
> So, Dear Reader, er, Dear Screener, if you have scrolled all the way
> down to the bottom of this seemingly bottonless guest column, let me
> ask you one more time (and your comments and feedback are very welcome
> in the comments section below): Were you reading this commentary, or
> were you screening it?
>
>
>
> -------------------------
>
> Dan Bloom is the author of over a dozen books
> in English, Japanese and Chinese. A freelancer writer and blogger
> based in Taiwan, he does not own a computer and has never even seen a
> Kindle or BlackBerry or an iPhone
posted by dan at 11:43 PM
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