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8 Responses to “Screen Reading”

1. Kira Says:
   September 23rd, 2008 at 10:47 pm
   1

   I agree, but. (Are you surprised?) There’s a level at which one reads things deeply, and there’s another at which one engages things deeply, and while most of the time those two things end up where you think they should go there’s also something to be said for the beauty of sharing wtih others, which is far more likely to happen on a screen than on a printout. As a consequence there’s an aspect at which we can experience things more deeply, or at least articulate them more deeply, on the screen - where we are at least engaging with others. (Apologies, I am - big surprise - dunk. But I think the point still stands.)

2. Kira Says:
   September 23rd, 2008 at 10:47 pm
   2

   I agree, but. (Are you surprised?) There’s a level at which one reads things deeply, and there’s another at which one engages things deeply, and while most of the time those two things end up where you think they should go there’s also something to be said for the beauty of sharing wtih others, which is far more likely to happen on a screen than on a printout. As a consequence there’s an aspect at which we can experience things more deeply, or at least articulate them more deeply, on the screen - where we are at least engaging with others. (Apologies, I am - big surprise - dunk. But I think the point still stands.)

3. Mr. McLaren Says:
   September 25th, 2008 at 12:11 am
   3

   I know what you’re saying (and I even got it the first time ) but I think the point is a little orthogonal to the “kinds of reading” thing.

   Yes, the screen is more useful for immediate connections, and the shorter form is better for connecting on a mass scale. And certainly the screen is generally more interactive. And yes, the connection, when it’s made, deepens the experience.

   So, I agree, but…

   If the point of the essay is that there are kind of communication that don’t translate to the screen, then you need other methods to communicate those ideas. I can certainly see how ideas, especially ideas that run against the received wisdom of the audience (and that can mean very different things depending on who the audience is) would need that more indepth presentation and a matching commitment from the reader in order to successfully communicate the idea. I might even go so far as to say that when the communication succeeds in that case (which will be much more rare than in screen presentations) that the deepening of the experience is of a different order of magnitude.

   Or, to put it another way, it’s easy for me to feel a connection to someone who’s expressing an idea that fits in my head–even if I don’t agree with it, as long as it lines up in some way with my worldview, I can pick it up off the screen and connect in some way with person putting it out there. But if stuff has to change inside my head before I can process the communication (I don’t mean that my opinions or beliefs need to change, necessarily, but rather that the way I look at things has to alter, or that I have to spend some time thinking about things I’ve never thought about before) I need a much more intense communication to get the job done. And that doesn’t transfer to the way people read off the screen. But when that intense communication works, the result is a whole different kind of connection than when the first one works.

   Are you picking up what I’m putting down?

4. Kira Says:
   September 25th, 2008 at 9:04 am
   4

   It doesn’t transfer to the way *most* people *currently* read off the screen. Let’s see what happens…

   But is it really different? Maxwell would say that communication is communication, I think. Information Theory is predicated on the idea that it’s not the medium but the message that matters. (I know, Mcluahan has kind of blown that up.) I’m kind of arguing with myself here to figure out what I think - so I think I’d better go away till I have something more useful to offer as a comment.

5. Mr. McLaren Says:
   September 25th, 2008 at 9:21 am
   5

   Well, let me personalize it: it doesn’t transfer to the way I read off the screen–and I spent A LOT of my time reading from the screen. I’m not the kind of ADD kid strawman that Bauerlein puts forth in his piece but I still find that when I run into text that would run to more than about 15 printed pages I literally can’t deal with it on the screen. It almost doesn’t matter if it’s technical documentation, a detailed, step-by-step argument, an extended essay, or even fiction.

   I almost always end up printing out Hal Duncan’s longer posts in order to be able to engage with them, for example. Partly this is because they tend to come in “parts” and I prefer to engage with the whole, but mostly it’s because they require a kind of focused thought that doesn’t equate for me with a screen read. Examples include his current thing on Narrative Function, or even better, his Hall of Pentheus one.

   This is also why I still spend a silly amount of money every month on print magazines: I want those long extended pieces that engage with a subject in depth, and I seem to only know how to read them in print.

   Maybe it is a training issue, and if there were more examples of this kind of writing in the screen world I could train myself to maintain that deep focus and engagement while reading off a screen, but I suspect that the nature of the screen lends itself to shorter and more interactive stuff, so that there will always be more of that kind of reading in screen-land.

   (I note, also, that I’m kind of ignoring the Kindle. This is not because of anything to do with this discussion, but just because I love books as physical objects as well as for their content and I can’t be rational about eBooks.)

6. Mr. McLaren Says:
   September 25th, 2008 at 9:27 am
   6

   P.S. I also want to say something about information theory, channel bandwidth, and human cognitive bias, but I don’t have time before my next meeting. The short version is that the stuff gets into the brain at more or less the same rate regardless of where you read it from (although I think focused reading actually increases the bandwidth some as the reading progresses), but that the effect that it can have on you is a function of both how much of it you take in (i.e. how long you keep the channel open), and how much you take in at once (i.e. do you consume a whole idea in one go, or do you get only a piece, or a series of pieces that should be the same as the whole, etc.)

   I think information theory would say it doesn’t matter if the message is transmitted in one long chunk, or five smaller chunks, so long as you got it all, but I also think human cognitive biases mean that the potential effect is very different.

7. Kira Says:
   September 28th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
   7

   Ah, I didn’t even think about human cognitive biases, which I think are woefully under-researched at this point (I mean, come on, who wouldn’t benefit from better learning how we learn?).

   But again: Old people (such as my grandmother before she died) had trouble adjusting to the telephone, and many (including her) couldn’t handle answering machines. Now cell phones!? Who’s to say print vs. screen isn’t similar? And maybe we’re just too dinosaur.

   Or maybe the medium will change the message, and that’s a bad thing.

   Like I said, still arguing with myself over here.

8. Kira Says:
   September 28th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
   8

   And for the record I should point out that his argument in no way applies to me. For work where I really have to engage in, and simultaneously read deeply from, what I’m doing I actually prefer to deal with 62-page documents on screen.

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