Group items tagged

For example, they want to be online “books,” “editions,” “encyclopedias,” “bookshelves,” “libraries,” “archives,” “repositories” or (a newer metaphor) “portals.” Such structures are supposed to make intuitive the relation between individual documents and other documents. But, frankly, many of those structures didn’t work too well even in the golden age of print. (Show me one person who has made a serendipitous discovery while wandering the library stacks, and I will show you a thousand whose eyes glazed over at the sheer anomie, inefficiency, and meaninglessness of it all.) They especially don’t work well now when stretched to describe online technologies that actually behave nothing like a book, edition, library and so on. My group thinks that 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 — much like opening a newspaper and debating it in a more socially networked version of the current New York Times Room for Debate. The future of peripheral attention is social networking, and the trick is to harness such attention — some call it distraction — well.

Electronic reading has become progressively easier as computer screens have improved and readers have grown accustomed to using them. Still, people read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent. Fifteen or 20 years ago, electronic reading also impaired comprehension compared to paper, but those differences have faded in recent studies.

Each young reader has to fashion an entirely new “reading circuit” afresh every time. There is no one neat circuit just waiting to unfold. This means that the circuit can become more or less developed depending on the particulars of the learner: e.g., instruction, culture, motivation, educational opportunity. Equally interesting, this tabula rasa circuit is shaped by the particular requirements of the writing system: for example, Chinese reading circuits require more visual memory than alphabets. This “open architecture” of the reading circuit makes the young reader’s developing circuit malleable to what the medium (e.g., digital online reading, book, etc) emphasizes.