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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| danbloom Groupie Antarctica zippy1300.blogspot.c Joined 5749 days ago 42 posts - 42 votes | Message 41 of 52 27 June 2009 at 4:23pm | IP Logged |
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Alex Beam, Boston Globe columnist, June 19 issue, takes up where we left off. Read it and comment: A top thinker in the USA wrote to me today re SCREENING debate here: She told me this today in an email re the BOSTON GLOBE article she read by Alex Beam above: "Hi Danny - yes, I read Alex's column on ''screening''. My personal opinion is that we are more likely to change the meaning of the word reading, than we are to develop a new word. But I could be wrong... Ready to be told "i told you so!" 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| danbloom Groupie Antarctica zippy1300.blogspot.c Joined 5749 days ago 42 posts - 42 votes | Message 42 of 52 27 June 2009 at 4:25pm | IP Logged |
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For the archive, in case you cannot find the Alex Beam column online:
I screen, you screen, we all screen By Alex Beam, Globe Staff | June 19, 2009 Do we read differently on the computer screen from how we read on the printed page? It’s an interesting question. Before hearing from the experts, let’s review what we think we know. Even the best computer screens are harder on the eyes than the paper page is. Jakob Nielsen, a Web usability researcher, reports that we generally read 25 percent more slowly on the screen. I read more quickly on the screen and edit out about 40 percent of what appears before my eyes. If you haven’t told me what you want by line four of your e-mail, trust me, I didn’t get the message. 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. 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.’’ When writing about digital reading - blogger Danny Bloom is pushing the neologism “screening,’’ for reading on the screen - Mangen, Nielsen, and others focus on the issue of distractibility. How can schoolchildren really read at computer terminals, scholars argue, knowing that more interesting Web pages are just a few clicks away? But don’t dedicated reading devices like the Sony Reader or the Amazon Kindle change this equation? Nielsen agrees that Kindle is trying to out-book the book. He argues that Kindle reading can be even more immersive than book reading: “All you are aware of is the next page, you don’t get this feeling that you are coming to the end of the book. It’s like being plunged directly into the author’s content.’’ I asked Mangen via e-mail if she thought there might be a future convergence of Kindle reading and Gutenberg reading. “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. “The fact that we do not have a direct physical, tangible access to the totality of the text when reading on Kindle affects the reading experience. When reading a book we can always see, and feel with our fingers and hands, our progress through the book as the pile of pages on the left side grows and the pile of pages on the right side gets smaller. At the same time, we can be absolutely certain that the technology [the book] will always work - there are no problems with downloading, missing text due to technical or infrastructure problems, etc.’’ She says the e-reader experience introduces “a degree of unpredictability and instability’’ that influences reading, even if we are not aware of it. Two years ago, media critic William Powers wrote a romantic defense of the ancient medium I publish in. His essay, “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal,’’ was widely quoted by journalists, of course. Mr. Paper - he not dead, Powers wrote: “There are cognitive, cultural, and social dimensions to the human-paper dynamic that come into play every time any kind of paper, from a tiny Post-It note to a groaning Sunday newspaper, is used to convey, retrieve, or store information.’’ Paper will never die, Powers concluded: “It becomes a still point, an anchor for the consciousness. It’s a trick the digital medium hasn’t mastered - not yet.’’ Two years ago, I might have agreed. If I had a daughter, yes, I would send out her wedding invitations on paper, not on Evite. (America has many daughters, hence a future for mail carriers.) But for books, magazines, and newspapers, “eternity’’ is a long time. 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. Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| danbloom Groupie Antarctica zippy1300.blogspot.c Joined 5749 days ago 42 posts - 42 votes | Message 43 of 52 24 July 2009 at 10:34am | IP Logged |
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More than a month later the Providence Journal in Rhode Island reprinted the Beam column. Meanwhile, Bill Hill, a former Microsoft brainstormer who now works on his own in the Seattle area, says there is no need for a word like screening for reading on screens.
At this blog site, he says: http://billhillsblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-creating-new-w ord-for-reading-on.html Why Creating A New Word For Reading On Screen Is A Terrible Idea... DanBloom is a journalist. Over the past few days, he's generated a flurry of activity on this blog, my Inbox and on FaceBook, with a suggestion that we need to create a new term to describe the activity of reading onscreen. He suggests the term "screening". (See the comments on my previous post: Paper Dies - But Reading Lives: The Richness of Future Web Reading ) Dan was also very enthusiastic about the multi-column layouts I've been experimenting with on my website, and wants to know if there are free templates anywhere he can use, for example so he could read his email in multi-column. He asked for my opinion on the term "screening". So here it is: Creating a new term for reading onscreen is not only unneccessary, but actually counter-productive. However, Dan's heart is clearly in the right place, so rather than just respond with another in a string of comments, I decided to escalate the topic and make it the subject of this post. (It's my party, and I'll blog if I want to...) First, the term "screening". IMO, that's like admitting defeat - that somehow "reading on screen" is different to "reading on paper". It's not. Yes, there are differences today. Reading on screen is not as comfortable as reading from paper. But it can - and should - be. Once it is, then all the advantages of digital information really start to pay off. Imagine a conversation between two people, fifty years from now... "How did they communicate information back in the old days?" "Well, they'd plant trees. After 30 or 40 years of growth, they'd cut them down and transport them in hydrocarbon-burning vehicles to a place called a pulp mill. There, they'd mash them up with a load of chemicals (when they were done with the chemicals, they'd dump them in the nearest river). "Then they'd roll and press the pulp into long sheets of "paper". They'd transport those (again, in hydrocarbon-burning vehicles) to a printing works, where they'd use huge machines to put dirty marks on the "paper", fold it, cut it up, and transport it (more trucks) to the readers, or "bookshops" where people would go to buy the information they wanted or needed." Anyone really believe we'll still be doing that, 50 years from now? For any kind of information? In the early days of automobiles, they were noisy, smelly and unreliable. In some parts of the world, you weren't allowed to drive one on the road without a man carrying a red flag walking in front of you as a warning to other road users. People said the automobile would never replace the horse as the primary means of transport... As far as reading onscreen is concerned, it's still the early days. It took about 400 years from Gutenberg to the Linotype machine. We've been doing onscreen reading for about 25 years - and it's only been even halfway bearable for about 10. We don't need the man with the red flag any more, but the automobile is still noisy, unreliable - and stinks. There's no reason it should be that way. All the technology we need to make reading great on a screen already exists, and could be implemented within a year or two. But the technology companies who make Web browsers, and the people who create Web content, have decided that fighting battles over market share based on "features check lists" is more important than stepping up and implementing a comprehensive plan to make real improvements for everyone who reads on the Web. Technology companies don't "get" the importance of fixing reading on screen. Journalists do. That's why I'm really happy to see someone like Dan stirring up the waters here. Journalists should be giving technology and media companies a hard time, along the following lines... Reading and writing are still the primary means of human communication (because text is easiest to create). Reading and writing are moving from "making and viewing dirty marks on shredded trees" to "making and viewing digital information". Reading onscreen is still inferior to reading from paper. What's your plan to make reading onscreen just as good? What's your schedule for implementing that plan? I'd like to see the answers they give. Now, on the subject of templates for multicolumn layout. The short answer is: I don't have any, although you're welcome to use any of the HTML and CSS markup from my website. But at the risk of repeating myself yet again: Multicolumn layout is much more suited to the screen than single-column (because of the way human vision works) However, it can't work without Pagination (who wants to scroll down to the bottom of one column, then have to scroll a long way up to the top of the next?) There are many different sizes and shapes of screen. Information has to be paginated "on the fly" for each device This requires adaptive layout. It's not rocket science - you can see it at work today in applications like the New York Times Reader. But no-one's doing it on the Web yet, although it's easily possible. Fixing reading on screen is vitally important for the human race. You can instantly create the Library of Congress in a village in West Africa. Digital information can be easily translated into minority languages. Books will cost less. Information can be kept up to date. And so on, and so on. I happen to believe that the first Web browser to do this properly will leave all the others sitting in the dust, wondering just where their market share disappeared to. I see plenty of "features lists" from the browsers. What I don't see is strategic, long-term vision. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| danbloom Groupie Antarctica zippy1300.blogspot.c Joined 5749 days ago 42 posts - 42 votes | Message 44 of 52 27 July 2009 at 7:40am | IP Logged |
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Says a top tech CEO in SF:
Do I think that we might need or invent a new word for reading on screens? Unclear to me that this will occur, just as people have been 'dialing' phones on phones with no dials for two decades or more; what would they do instead? Tap? Touch? It is the case that reading on computer screens tends to be more scanning, hopping from place to place, saccadic (sp?) motion skipping along. HOWEVER: reading on nice, reflective screens (eInk, and - we hope - our screens) is much more like the linear, sequential reading process we also use with books, etc. It, thus, occurs to me that the word 'reading' might endure. But the concept of a book, or a chapter? (By analogy: what has happened to nouns like record, album, etc., now that music has become digital - while our verbs remain play and record.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| danbloom Groupie Antarctica zippy1300.blogspot.c Joined 5749 days ago 42 posts - 42 votes | Message 45 of 52 27 July 2009 at 7:42am | IP Logged |
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Danbloom,
(cc’ing Jakob because he might find my response interesting.) There are many forms of reading. we already talk about skimming and browsing, about being deeply engrossed reading and surface versus reflective reading. I see no need for yet another term that is dependent upon technology. When I read deeply on my kindle, I call it reading. it is no different than when I read deeply with a book. In both cases, I want the technology to disappear (paper or book reader) and to become engrossed in the story or the ideas. You suggest “screening.” I see no need for such a term. Don Norman Nielsen Norman group Northwestern University & KAIST (Korea) -- Don Norman Nielsen Norman Group Breed Professor of Design, Northwestern University Co-Director MMM (MBA + MEM): Co-Director Segal Design Institute 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| danbloom Groupie Antarctica zippy1300.blogspot.c Joined 5749 days ago 42 posts - 42 votes | Message 46 of 52 27 July 2009 at 7:43am | IP Logged |
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''Thanks. A noble crusade, but we'll change when it actually is in use.''
Sent from his iPhone Damon Darlin at the @nytimes.com 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| danbloom Groupie Antarctica zippy1300.blogspot.c Joined 5749 days ago 42 posts - 42 votes | Message 47 of 52 27 July 2009 at 7:44am | IP Logged |
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I am getting feedback right now this summer from marvin Mirsky at MIT
he says YES, screening is good idea...KEVIN KELLY SAYS YES DO IT...JAMEs FALLOWS SAYS NO WAY....JOHN MARKOFF SAYS HMMMMMMM.........ESTHER DYSON SAYS NO.... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| danbloom Groupie Antarctica zippy1300.blogspot.c Joined 5749 days ago 42 posts - 42 votes | Message 48 of 52 27 July 2009 at 7:46am | IP Logged |
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Another illustration of the rapidly-changing world happened last week,
when a young Japanese woman won Japan's premier literary award, the Rashomon Award - their equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize - for her novel published serially in blog format, and read mostly on mobile telephones. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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