Reading Onscreen<\/a> argues that the value of digital reading depends on the kind of reading you\u2019re doing: \u201cdigital reading is fine for many short pieces or for light content we don\u2019t intend to analyze or reread.\u201d But \u201ceReading is less well suited for many longer works or even for short ones requiring serious thought.\u201d<\/p>\nIn part, Baron\u2019s point is simply empirical. She cites many studies that indicate how people distinguish reading onscreen from reading a book. For instance, \u201cZiming Liu at San Jose State University compared reading behavior onscreen versus in hardcopy. Study participants (graduate students and working professionals) devoted more time to browsing and scanning, and to reading selectively, when working onscreen than when reading print. Subjects also reported that their onscreen reading was less in-depth than with hardcopy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Why should this be? What do you lose by reading a serious book onscreen? It partly has to do with book technology: You can flip back and forth with ease, reminding yourself of earlier parts of the argument or story, comparing one passage to another. Zig-zag is essential to deep, close reading, and e-reading tends to inhibit it: It\u2019s straight-line, forward-moving. It\u2019s partly the fact that many of the screens we read on are on devices that interrupt our reading. Our tablets remind us of emails or Tweets, and so we don\u2019t keep our minds on what we\u2019re reading as much. We become practitioners of what Baron calls \u201chyper-attention.\u201d Overall, e-books are not conducive to reading works as connected wholes.<\/p>\n
The most important implication of Baron\u2019s argument, though, is more phenomenological than pragmatic. If books were only<\/em> machines for conveying information, e-books and books would be all but interchangeable. Books, though, communicate through the whole body; reading a book is not merely an intellectual but a sensory experience, as we feel the heft of the volume and the texture of the page (she cites someone\u2019s estimate that the data of 3500 books on an e-reading weighs a billionth of a billionth of a gram), smell the ink and the aging, hear the crinkle of pages turned. Baron quotes\u00a0Julia Keller: \u201cGoogle can\u2019t provide the goose bumps that go along with being in the presence of a 14th Century book.\u201d<\/p>\nYou won\u2019t ever find a pressed flower in your e-book, or a love letter from your great-grandmother to your great-grandfather. For years, I\u2019ve had a 10 ruble bill in my Bible; every time I come across it, I say a prayer for my friends in Russia. Can\u2019t do that with my Kindle.<\/p>\n
Some of Baron\u2019s arguments are more driven by sentiment than reason, but that\u2019s part of her point: Reading isn\u2019t simply an activity of the reason, and in that respect books present a quite different experience than electronic media.<\/p>\n
Baron summarizes some of the remarkable results of brain studies of reading. As she says, \u201cSince the neural tools for reading are cobbled together from structures designed for other purposes, it is not surprising that reading activates areas related to what the text is about. Say you are reading a scene in a novel in which the hero is running to escape the villain. As you read, the motor area of your brain lights up\u2014even though you\u2019re curled up in a chair, not moving. . . .\u00a0Besides motor area activity associated with action stories, there\u2019s evidence that the olfactory area of the cortex lights up when you see words like \u2018perfume\u2019 or \u2018coffee,\u2019 and that when you read metaphors involving texture such as \u2018He had leathery hands,\u2019 the sensory cortex is activated. There is even evidence that when reading about the lives of others (real or imagined), the brain neurologically registers our attempts to figure out what characters think and feel, and to identify with them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baron\u2019s stated aim is to \u201cmove beyond arguments of nostalgia and habit to figuring out what it is about print and digital platforms that leads us to read on them in particular ways.\u201d Her book is full of summaries of research, evidence from her own surveys of students, and reflections on the phenomenology of reading. By distinguishing different types of reading and different types of texts, she is able to admit the utility and benefits of e-reading while stressing the losses incurred by the abandonment of books.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Naomi Baron\u2019s\u00a0Reading Onscreen argues that the value of digital reading depends on the kind of reading you\u2019re doing: \u201cdigital reading is fine for many short pieces or for light content we don\u2019t intend to analyze or reread.\u201d But \u201ceReading is less well suited for many longer works or even for short ones requiring serious thought.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1181,111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"\n
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