Online Literacy

Since you are reading this blog post, I am assuming that you're no stranger to reading things online. How much of this post are you planning on reading? Are you going to skip down a few paragraphs? Does italicized text draw your attention?

In my interview with Isthmus news editor Bill Lueders, I asked him about the difference between reading news online and reading a newspaper. He opined, "I personally think that having a paper in hand allows for better absorption of content than looking at stories online. I think people read faster and grasp less online." This view is shared by Mark Bauerlein who has a thought-provoking article up at The Chronicle of Higher Education called "Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind". In it, Bauerlein argues that browsing the Web, IMing, hanging out at social networking sites, and the like fosters reading skills that promote glossing or a giving texts a brief once-over to glean certain bits. The result of the codification of this mindset is that the ability to slowly analyze writing in-depth is lost; texts that demand the reader scrutinize it as a whole instead of grabbing a few bullet points are not understood or, worse, ignored.

Bauerlein begins by pointing out the research of Jakob Nielsen:

When Jakob Nielsen, a Web researcher, tested 232 people for how they read pages on screens, a curious disposition emerged. Dubbed by The New York Times "the guru of Web page 'usability,'" Nielsen has gauged user habits and screen experiences for years, charting people's online navigations and aims, using eye-tracking tools to map how vision moves and rests. In this study, he found that people took in hundreds of pages "in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school." It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens quickly, too. "F for fast," Nielsen wrote in a column. "That's how users read your precious content."

In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, Nielsen exclaimed, "'Reading' is not even the right word." The subjects usually read only the first two words in headlines, and they ignored the introductory sections. They wanted the "nut" and nothing else. A 2003 Nielsen warning asserted that a PDF file strikes users as a "content blob," and they won't read it unless they print it out. A "booklike" page on screen, it seems, turns them off and sends them away.

For Bauerlein, a professor of English, these findings have pedagogical implications and these are what capture his attention. How should computers be integrated into the classroom? What role should "slow-reading" have in education today? I do not teach and I graduated from college 13 years ago so, after reading the article, I was inclined to ask why. Why should it be that sitting before a computer screen promotes a superficial reading style? The article doesn't address the issue, at least not directly. Is there something about sitting before a computer screen vs. having printed text in our hands? Maybe there's a part of our brains that equates computer screens with television so we are inclined to think that which happens on the display should be akin to the soundbite qualities of TV. The tactile quality of print, perhaps? Or is there something about the circumstances surrounding computer use? What about how computer technology and the Internet evolved? With the limited hard drive space and dial-up connections of the mid-1990s, webpages were designed with a certain aesthetic, namely, concision, and this has carried over to the age of terabyte hard drives and broadband connections. What do you think?

I'm not sure exactly why I developed this preference, but I don't want concision from most of my online reading. Sure, it's great for some things but when I'm out to learn or understand something, I tend to seek out lengthy articles. When I see that one has, say, four pages, I am elated because that means it'll likely be something I can sink my teeth into as opposed to an ephemeral burst of trivia which I can discard before moving onto the next one.

Then there's that last sentence: "A 'booklike' page on screen, it seems, turns them off and sends them away." Does anyone reading this post actually read e-books? I admit it, I do. I sometimes dig into one during my lunch hour these days but read many more a few years ago when I was housesitting. I just copied a bunch onto my laptop and brought a mini-library with me to Edgerton on it instead of a stack of books. E-books come in various formats. Excluding those for PDAs, there's PDF, Microsoft Reader, plain text, Word documents, HTML, and other less common ones. Personally, I prefer a more "booklike" page on my screen as I like the idea of pages – of discrete sections of text – instead of a continuous stream of it. While a computer screen can mimic a book only so much, I just don't want my reading area cluttered with buttons, toolbars, and rulers. Adobe Reader has come a long way with version 9 being quite good for reading e-books. There's a full screen mode which sets your page against a black background, which is nice. However, I'm still a fan of MS Reader. I appreciate the ability to fine tune my ClearType settings plus I can bookmark pages, highlight text, and add e-marginalia.