screenreading

People don’t read off the web. I hear that every time some expert talks about Internet practices and how one should design ones page for spot browsing versus reading long sections of text. Amber MacArthur, formerly of TechTV Canada’s Call-for-Help, says that every times she critiques someone’s homepage. My friend, Holly, gasped when I showed her my blog and how much text I tend to put into my entries. And Steve Krug’s excellent book, ““Don’t Make Me Think” pretty much makes it clear that the web is NOT for reading. So, when I hear that all of the time and then I observe that if the text is of any length my colleagues usually expect or require a printed copy of the text, I have to wonder if it’s not really about the Internet as much as about reading off of computer screens. I used to think that it was a prejudice of my generation that something was not “real” until it was presented in “printed” form. But if the youngsters who grew up with the Internet insist that they get a printed copy of whatever they were looking at, then it must be something else.

I know that there is a whole science and industry built on this one question. Is it biology, the interaction of human eyes reading text off of the reflective light from paper versus words projected with transmissive light off of a computer screen? Is it just habit, that we prefer reading from a medium that we can hold in our hands that is relatively easily to transport? Is it the emergence of a non-linear medium simultaneous to the decline of the practice of long-form reading in general? Or maybe we just don’t want to be stuck sitting at a computer.

So, I’m faced with several ironies when it comes to this whole thing about reading off of computer screen. First is that I really want to cut down on all of the paper and expensive laser-printer cartridges that I spent last year, so I’m posting all of my units on my class server and making PDF copies of my text and NOT printing out anything that can be done on-screen. The second irony is that I’m beginning this experiment with my yearbook class, whose main goal is to produce a printed book (I don’t know, I find that funny…). Next thing is that, I am more of web guy, love that I can produce image rich text and post it on any of my blogs and websites, and here I am teaching a print-media class.

scottystechjournal

In all the sci-fi movies and TV shows from the 50s to 70s paper was dead and everyone carried around little reading devices. For example, in the classic StarTrek episode, “The Trouble With Tribbles” engineer Scott was overjoyed when he was confined to quarters because that meant that he could read his technical manuals, and the next thing you know he planted himself in front of a computer terminal. Of course, even StarTrek reversed course when they frequently had the captain in “Star Trek The Next Generation”, Jean Luc Picard, spend his non-duty time reading a book, usually something written by Shakespeare or a copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Interestingly, carrying around a book might be seen as something a bit aristocratic or something a scholar might do, but it would be an expensive (and bulky) extravagance for the common space traveller to possess. Alas, in the here and now American students carry about, abuse and lose a heavy collection of books and papers that could all be replace by words on a screen. But no one wants to read off a screen. We’ll see how my experiment goes. The technology is there, but everyone would rather kill a tree than read from a screen. JBB