Check today’s New York Times for a fascinating “debate” about whether there are differences in the way the brain takes in text when read via paper book versus a screen.
The experts weighing in on the subject include Sandra Aamodt, author of Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life, Maryanne Wolfe, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Alan Liu, head of the Transliteracies U.C. Multi-Campus Research Group on online reading practices and technologies, and two other scholars in the field.
You need to read this article. The answers are probably not what you’d expect. Here are a few samples:
“Web 2.0 offers a different kind of metaphor: not a containing structure but a social experience. Reading environments should not be books or libraries. They should be like the historical coffeehouses, taverns and pubs where one shifts flexibly between focused and collective reading….”
“As technology continues to improve, we can probably expect to see electronic reading become as useful as paper for most purposes.” (but not for flipping back and forth between pages)
“We humans were never born to read.”
“Aristotle worried about the three lives of the “good society”: the first life is the life of productivity and knowledge gathering; the second, the life of entertainment; and the third, the life of reflection and contemplation.” Do we risk losing the third life, the joy and effort of thinking our own thoughts and going beyond what’s written?”
“The Internet makes words as cheap and as significant as Cheese Doodles.”
“My own research shows that people are continually distracted when working with digital information. They switch simple activities an average of every three minutes (e.g. reading email or IM) and switch projects about every 10 and a half minutes. It’s just not possible to engage in deep thought about a topic when we’re switching so rapidly.”
