Paper vs. computer screen - The Boston Globe - 12 views
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A Norwegian researcher, Anne Mangen, recently weighed in with an interesting paper in the Journal of Research in Reading, asserting that screen reading and page reading are radically different. “The feeling of literally being in touch with the text is lost when your actions - clicking with the mouse, pointing on touch screens, or scrolling with keys or on touch pads - take place at a distance from the digital text, which is, somehow, somewhere inside the computer, the e-book, or the mobile phone,’’ Mangen writes.
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Her conclusion: “Materiality matters. . . . One main effect of the intangibility of the digital text is that of making us read in a shallower, less focused way.’
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Reading digital text will always differ from reading text that is not digital (i.e., that has a physical, tangible materiality), no matter how reader-friendly and ‘paper-like’ the digital reading device (e.g., Kindle etc.),’’ she answered
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She says the e-reader experience introduces “a degree of unpredictability and instability’’ that influences reading, even if we are not aware of it.
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When Kindle-like readers cost less than $50 and the e-Ink technology is not just very good, but excellent, there may be more “screening,’’ and less reading, in our future.
