Specifically aimed at the issue of illiteracy and technology in college.

In classrooms today, instructors are frustrated by the fact that their students can read in the sense of pronouncing words, but frequently seem unable to comprehend in any depth what they have read. Few can paraphrase ideas by expressing them in different words. Many cannot find implied main ideas in a passage or synthesize several details to recognize a general trend. Of course, such problems are not new. They have always been characteristics of weak or learning disabled students. What is new is their increasing prevalence. Students who are articulate speakers with above average technical skills, who in other respects participate and learn well, may still perform ineffectively as readers

Reading from a CRT (or video screen) is an unnatural activity because of the way the brain processes video information. Reading is a left-brain activity, whereas viewing video is a right-brain one. The mosaic pattern of light pulses must be reassembled by the right brain to create an image (pp.332-33). Thus words on a computer screen are seen as images, more like the jpg images that may accompany them than like spoken or written language. Because they are made of light patterns, they are "read" in the same way photographs are "read," described here by Postman (1985) in his book Amusing Ourselves To Death: The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or a sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or listener is deprived of what was said before and after. But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way…" (p.73). College Quarterly - Winter 2004 Page 5 of 13 http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/2004-vol07-num01-winter/charters.htmlIn this sense, then, interacting with a computer screen may be physically and psychologically more similar to watching television than to reading a book, print notwithstanding