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Things have been quiet in the print versus digital debate lately for which I am glad, what’s the saying about beating a dead horse? I do understand that there is still much we don’t know about our brains and how reading online and reading in print affects how we read, what we read and how well we read it and I am grateful that the debate is heading down that river and away from the techno-evangelist’s books are dead digital utopia. But because it has been awhile since there has been anything “out there” about it, someone had to write an update about where we stand just in case we forget. And like a moth to the flame I had to fly right for it.
Everythig Science Knows about Reading on Screens is pretty much a summary to-date. You won’t find anything new or revelatory in the article unless you are one of the few readers in the world who have somehow managed to be disconnected from it all (and if you are that sort of reader, you have my admiration!).
What is most striking about this article is how it proves a number of things about reading on screens that it discusses. Like skimming. The presentation of the article invites it with blurry moving things on the header and cutting up the text of the article. I almost didn’t finish reading the article because all of the moving blurs were giving me a headache! The article quotes Ziming Liu, a researcher at San Jose State University:
Liu noted in his study that sustained attention seems to decline when people read onscreen rather than on paper, and that people also spend less time on in-depth reading. ‘In digital, we can link in different media, images, sound, and other text, and people can get overwhelmed,” explains Andrew Dillon, a professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas, Austin, “These are disruptive activities that can carry a cost in terms of attention.’
Ironically, this falls immediately below one of the big, moving blurry blocks! Distracting, check! Overwhelming, check!
We’ve been trained by internet articles like this one. It isn’t necessarily that I want to skim or that I purposely interrupt my reading with distractions, it’s the way words have been presented on the internet since websites were invented that has made me read this way on a screen. So is it any surprise then when given an article or story to read on a screen even without all of the attendant internet bling that I might read it just as though all that bling were there?
The article concludes:
Despite the apparent benefits of paper, Mangen and other reading researchers caution the screen-reading vs. traditional reading question has nuances that scientists have yet to fully understand. Which method works better may depend on the individual (for example, there’s evidence that for some people with dyslexia, e-readers improve reading speed and comprehension). Ultimately, it may be that both print and screen have unique advantages, and we’ll need to be able to read equally well on both—which means keeping our distracted habits onscreen from bleeding into what we read on an e-book or paperback. And reading researchers have some advice for how to prevent this: forget your smartphone and computer, sit down, and read a book.
Common sense. But I have to stop myself decrying the painfully obvious conclusion because common sense isn’t always a strong point for a good many people I have found, especially those getting grants to study the things that avid readers already know and could have told them without any trouble. Should it ever happen that researchers ask us one of these days about print and digital reading, someone is going to have to pick me up off the floor because I will have fainted.
I used to be so opposed to breaking up my text with anything that I wouldn’t even put pictures on my blog. I still usually won’t put pictures of book covers.
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Jeanne, I used to be that way too! Not until a month or two ago did I start putting book covers at the beginning and that only because someone commented that she’d like to be able to use Pinterest to save posts about books she was interested in reading. When I started writing about gardening a few years ago I was reluctant to include photos but people kept asking for them. I generally only use thumbnails and have the text flow around them and have made my peace with that 🙂
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The irony of the big blurry blocks kills me! Do you think anyone checks anything anymore before it is actually published on the net?
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cirtnecce, I know! It cracked me up! Whoever inserted the graphics probably thought it was way cool. *big eye roll*
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I have over 100 books on my Kindle (app on the iPad). 98% of them were free because they’re classics, but I don’t often read on it. When I read on my Kindle the screen seems too dark. The iPad is better for clarity but it’s tactility (is that a word?) doesn’t compare with a print book. I do like the fact that if I’m traveling I can carry a large library around with me on my iPad. My concentration is far greater with a physical book, and I like that I can easily find my way back to a section I want to re-read. And I love the advice given in this article…”sit down and read a book.” Duh.
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Grad, I laughed at the advice too. It’s like those scientific studies that are done to prove the blindingly obvious like people prefer not to be too hot or too cold. 😉
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I like the description of our reading brain circuitry as being “very plastic.” I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but it makes sense that we’d be adaptable in that way. All v. interesting!
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Jenny, yup our brains are plastic, everything we do changes them. In some ways that is really scary and in others it is quite liberating.
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Your recent post about children’s books reminded me of my all-time favorite poet, Mr. Shel Silverstein and this is my favorite of his poems. I haven’t read it in years and I can still picture myself as a child lying on my stomach in bed, chin in my hands, reading this. Happy Saturday.
“I cannot go to school today”
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
“I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry.
I’m going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I’ve counted sixteen chicken pox.
And there’s one more – that’s seventeen,
And don’t you think my face looks green?
My leg is cut, my eyes are blue,
It might be the instamatic flu.
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I’m sure that my left leg is broke.
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button’s caving in.
My back is wrenched, my ankle’s sprained,
My ‘pendix pains each time it rains.
My toes are cold, my toes are numb,
I have a sliver in my thumb.
My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,
I think my hair is falling out.
My elbow’s bent, my spine ain’t straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,
There’s a hole inside my ear.
I have a hangnail, and my heart is …
What? What’s that? What’s that you say?
You say today is ………….. Saturday?
G’bye, I’m going out to play!”
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Lynnette, Silverstein is wonderful. I have loved him since I was a kid and have a number of his books. He has a talent for being weird and funny but also serious and sad at the same time.
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Two comments:
First, The Onion nailed the sad decline in public willingness to grapple with text sans graphics back in 2010: http://www.theonion.com/article/nation-shudders-at-large-block-of-uninterrupted-te-16932
Second, having used both a Kindle Paperwhite (which is lousy for just about anything *but* reading text) and a Kindle Fire, I can say that without question the Fire is, for me, simply too distraction-rich to be a good way to read. The Paperwhite (and the Nook I had before that), however, are very good ways to read books that are light or free of graphics, which means it’s an excellent way to use the Internet Archive, Open Library and Project Gutenberg to read books that are scarce and expensive in hardcopy.
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Neglected, oh thanks for The Onion link! That was very sad but hilarious all at once. I have an iPad and hate reading anything on it but magazines I can borrow from my library. I have an e-ink Kobo though and like you I find it great for reading public domain books and have not noticed any problems with recall or concentration.
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Aw, this was a really nice post. Taking a few minutes and actual effort to generate a superb
article… but what can I say… I procrastinate a lot and never
seem to get anything done.
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Still catching up. Strangely I like images and broken up text when I’m reading online so I do use at least one image (usually only one, rarely none) on my blog posts. I often don’t really LOOK at the images on other people’s posts, particularly little book cover images, but I find reading on the screen hard on the eyes and so images, headings, dot points, inserted quote blocks that “break” it up seem to help. With novels though, no. I have no need for illustrations, and am very happy to read plain text for page after page after page.
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I don’t mind having text broken up while reading online, it does give the eye a break as you say. I can’t imagine wanting to scroll through block after block of text without any kind of visual relief. That said, the breaks have to be well done, unlike the article with its big blurry moving images. Pull quotes, small, static images, headings, etc, much nicer for the eyes and my brain. I think reading page after page of print text is possible because we naturally get a break when we have to go to a different page.
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