Screen Reading and Print Reading: commentary blog by Mark Bauerlein, Emory University, Chronicle of Higher Education website blog
Screen Reading and Print Reading:
commentary blog by Mark Bauerlein, Emory University,
Chronicle of Higher Education website blog
NOTE: Dr Bauerlein is the author of
"The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30"
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbest-Generation-Stupefies-Americans-Jeopardizes/dp/1585426393
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Screen-ReadingPrint/8551/
Screen Reading and Print Reading
By Mark Bauerlein
With students doing so much of their reading assignments through the screen instead of on book or paper formats, it's important for educators to determine how the shift is altering their habits and learning. The research is just beginning, but it's getting deeper, and one recent article worthy of note appears in the Journal of Research in Reading (2008, pp. 404-419). It's by Anne Mangen, and it has the title "Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion."
Mangen notes the growing sub-field of screen reading studies, but finds that the "intangibility and volatility of the digital text" remain under-examined. She focuses first, then, on the material nature of digital and non-digital reading experiences. "Unlike print texts," she writes, "digital texts are ontologically intangible and detached from the physical and mechanical dimension of their material support, namely, their computer or e-book (or other devices, such as the PDA, the iPod or the mobile phone" (405).
This is important, she argues, because "materiality matters." The reading experience includes manual activities and haptic perceptions (what the skin and muscles and joints register), and so as activities and perceptions of that kind are changed from one kind of reading experience to another because of the object, the reading experience, too, will change.
The differences between screen and paper go deeper than the physics of each. They also involve the relationship the reader has to them. For Mangen, a crucial difference lies in the nature of the immersion in screen "worlds" as being distinct from the technology that facilitates it. In other words, the mouse, head set, and so on provide the entry into the visual world, but are not constitutive parts of it. "In contrast," she explains, "consider the sense of being immersed in a fictional world which is largely the product of our own mental, cognitive abilities to create that fictive, virtual (in the figurative sense of the word) world from the symbolic representations -- the text, whether purely linguistic or multi-modal, digital or print -- displayed by means of any technological platform." Books don't have tools to help readers make up that fictive world, and so they do it more with their own minds.
That's a dense formulation, but it comes down to physical and technical features that do or do not "disturb" the immersion typical of reading a novel (as opposed to the immersion typical of playing a video game). Compare clicking on the mouse to turning the page. Turning the page is a literal touch of the thing you read. Clicking the mouse is an instrumental touch of the device that purveys an intangible thing through it. You read a book, but you don't read a computer screen. You read a text through the screen. You turn a page, which is part of the book, but you click a mouse or touch a screen icon which is not part of the "book" you're reading. "The digital text has no material substance," no tactile existence, and so it has no haptically-perceived relation to the screen.
One effect, Mangen maintains, is that the digital text makes us read "in a shallower, less focused way."
There are other effects as well, but this one is far-reaching. While "shallower" reading through or on the screen serves certain purposes quite well, when it comes to reading complex texts and interpreting, analyzing, or even summarizing them, a slower and deeper habit is needed.
For more, see Mangen's interview with Danny Bloom here.
posted by dan at 9:55 AM
3 Comments:
luther_blissett comments at the Chron site:
- October 21, 2009 at 01:15 pm
Wow, how many decades of "history of the book" research are ignored here!
First off, a book is as much a machine as a screen. One doesn't "read" a book. One reads words printed on a piece of paper. This is no less true about books than about screens. If you want a sense of "machine failure" in books, take a look at any Norton Anthology. The medium -- the typeface, the font, the margins, the paper, the size and weight of the volume -- gets in the way of the message, makes reading physically uncomfortable.
So sure, turning a page and clicking a mouse are different physical activities, but the latter is no more naturally or organically connected to the text itself than the former. Walter Ong has published countless examples of early readers of print making the same complaints about the lack of organicity in the transition from orality to writing or print. We lose the delicate modulations of the throat, the delicious roundness of the acoustic situation, the sensual vibrations in the ear, all through the horrible, artificial nastiness of the book.
The page is not "a part" of the book, unless by "book" you mean the machine that delivers the text to the audience. A page is an interface, just as a mouse is. We can, in theory, separate "the text" from "the book." The page is an artificial addition to the text. It arbitrarily cuts up the text; once upon a time, it involved the actual cutting of pages by the reader to read onward. (One could also look at websites like The British Library's Turning the Page, in which users actually turn the page on the screen in the same physical gesture as turning a book page. It doesn't make a huge difference in the reading experience, but it feels great to pretend to turn the giant pages of a medieval Bible.)
Finally, books have all sorts of ways to do the imaginative work of the reader. Books have pictures, pie charts, text boxes, illuminations, diagrams, typefaces, and all sorts of other apparatuses that complicate any simple equation of "book" with "immersion in a reader's mental representation of what's going on the book." An e-book can be more devoid of multiple media than a real book. Compare the on-line editions of *The Canterbury Tales* with the illuminated manuscripts of it. or The Norton Critical edition. The former are often strictly text, without even footnotes or editorial insertiions. The latter involve images or footnotes or intros and essays and historical context and all sorts of stuff that does the reader's work for him.
In any case, this argument sounds simplistic and willfully ignorant of decades of research on the shift from orality to literacy, from manuscript to print cultures, etc. A book is a machine, a technology, and it's only the way we've naturalized it that makes us think the computer screen is somehow more artificial.
but you know, Mark I feel, we are doomed, doomed....because even IF future
brain studyies with MRI scans by PHDs and neuroscientists SHOW that
reading on screens is inferior to paper reading, in terms on
processing and retention and analysis and criticial thinking
skills.....even still, the gadget makers will continue to come out
with more and more NOOKs and VOOKS and KROOKS and KINDLEs in order to
market their wares and make money for shareholders and there's not
stopping techno tsunami which is engulfing us, sometimes for the
better, sometimes for the worse.....i will stick with paper, thank
you, but we're doomed anyways, the techies will WIN, the gadgets heads
run the world now....SIGH
Yet another sublime piece to scread, .... Dr Bauerlein wrote a great post!. Keep posting these opeds and send them along, and I'll keep zipping through them...haptically or otherwise.
Ciao for now,
Kelly in Italy
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