{"id":16057,"date":"2014-07-18T04:28:56","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T04:28:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/how-to-be-a-better-online-reader\/"},"modified":"2014-07-18T04:28:56","modified_gmt":"2014-07-18T04:28:56","slug":"how-to-be-a-better-online-reader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/how-to-be-a-better-online-reader\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Be a Better Online Reader"},"content":{"rendered":"

How to Be a Better Online Reader<\/a><\/p>\n

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The shift from print to digital reading may lead to more than changes in speed and physical processing. It may come at a cost to understanding, analyzing, and evaluating a text. Much of Mangen\u2019s research focusses on how the format of reading material may affect not just eye movement or reading strategy but broader processing abilities. One of her main hypotheses is that the physical presence of a book\u2014its heft, its feel, the weight and order of its pages\u2014may have more than a purely emotional or nostalgic significance. People prefer physical books, not out of old-fashioned attachment but because the nature of the object itself has deeper repercussions for reading and comprehension. \u201cAnecdotally, I\u2019ve heard some say it\u2019s like they haven\u2019t read anything properly if they\u2019ve read it on a Kindle. The reading has left more of an ephemeral experience,\u201d she told me. Her hunch is that the physicality of a printed page may matter for those reading experiences when you need a firmer grounding in the material. The text you read on a Kindle or computer simply doesn\u2019t have the same tangibility.<\/p>\n

In new research that she and her colleagues will present for the first time at the upcoming conference of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media, in Torino, Italy, Mangen is finding that that may indeed be the case. She, along with her frequent collaborator Jean-Luc Velay, Pascal Robinet, and Gerard Olivier, had students read a short story\u2014Elizabeth George\u2019s \u201cLusting for Jenny, Inverted\u201d (their version, a French translation, was called \u201cJenny, Mon Amour\u201d)\u2014in one of two formats: a pocket paperback or a Kindle e-book. When Mangen tested the readers\u2019 comprehension, she found that the medium mattered a lot. When readers were asked to place a series of events from the story in chronological order\u2014a simple plot-reconstruction task, not requiring any deep analysis or critical thinking\u2014those who had read the story in print fared significantly better, making fewer mistakes and recreating an over-all more accurate version of the story. The words looked identical\u2014Kindle e-ink is designed to mimic the printed page\u2014but their physical materiality mattered for basic comprehension.<\/p>\n

Wolf\u2019s concerns go far beyond simple comprehension. She fears that as we turn to digital formats, we may see a negative effect on the process that she calls deep reading. Deep reading isn\u2019t how we approach looking for news or information, or trying to get the gist of something. It\u2019s the \u201csophisticated comprehension processes,\u201d as Wolf calls it, that those young architects and doctors were missing. \u201cReading is a bridge to thought,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd it\u2019s that process that I think is the real endangered aspect of reading. In the young, what happens to the formation of the complete reading circuitry? Will it be short-circuited and have less time to develop the deep-reading processes? And in already developed readers like you and me, will those processes atrophy?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How to Be a Better Online Reader The shift from print to digital reading may lead to more than changes in speed and physical processing. It may come at a cost to understanding, analyzing, and evaluating a text. Much of Mangen\u2019s research focusses on how the format of reading material may affect not just eye […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-link","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-link"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-4aZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16057\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}