Digital reading versus traditional reading

Once again I am targeting social media in this article. I do realise I share a love and hate relationship with this platform, hence I find it very important to emphasize the pros and cons of it’s correct use. In this case, I am addressing a fundamental aspect of human growth and mental acquirement. I am referring to the way in which our reading education has changed or further developed since the advent of the Internet and social media. How have these digital platforms affected our reading skills?

When I was growing up, I did all my research for school projects and coursework in the library. I spent hours looking up books and journal references which had been previously shortlisted by our professors. The advantage of this method was the author credibility and blind faith in the material we utilized. Today a student has to be rather astute and make several verifications before validating data that has been picked up on the Internet.

Returning to my traditional methods, I recall photocopying pages and then using a highlighter pen to filter the key points from the manually examined data. Please note, “Manually examined data”. This forms an integral part of your learning and reading process. It not only enables you to understand the whole text, but also obliges you to filter the important points from all the depth. The way in which we process text on paper is rather different to the way we process information on e-Readers and on social media.

I will return to this point later on, but let’s look at another fundamental attribute of reading. How are we determining our content? What discriminates your choice of articles? I personally read the traditional newspaper and I also have specific filters or portals that I follow on Social Media. I am alerted on new articles or content that I might be interested in. Basically we have today at our disposal the luxury of a tailor made reading list, thanks to the technological filters that address our needs. This saves us time as we can avoid reading content that does not take our fancy.

On the other hand, there is the contraposition. There are times when you read one article fro a specific portal and you make the grave mistake of subscribing to their alerts on impulse or even based on a popularity poll. The next step is coming across more articles which perhaps only interest you 20-25%, but because a few people you know on Facebook have “liked” it, pushes you to either read it or power browse it. Worse case scenario would be you doing a “like” on blind trust. Either way, you have failed to read entirely and got sucked into media pressure for receiving validation for a popular opinion. If you have then gone and shared the article it adds you to the list of marketing victim and creating false demand. A perfectly unread  article is being shared amongst your followers! I know I have gone off tangent here, but please take a moment to reflect on the repercussions of you sharing or liking an article, especially if you have a handsome number of friends or followers.

I will now return to the beginning of the article and the differences in how we process information on screen and in print.  An article written by Nicholas Carr of the Atlantic states that online reading may have rewired our brains altogether, to decrease our abilities to read and comprehend text. The usual thing would be to focus on the overall meaning of the article, but instead we are examining the key words or salacious headlines or highlighted words and deducing our own conclusions on the article. This is a tempting practice and I do not blame screen readers as I often do the same.

Unfortunately this results in weak comprehension skills, especially for many students. Claire Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate in creative writing from American University says humans are developing digital brains, whereby they are forming new circuits for skimming through the vast amounts of information online. This can be considered in a way a positive alternative to compliment traditional deep reading, developed over several millennia. One has to be smart about using the right technique at the opportune moment and thus not worry about the superficial browsing methods used on social media.

The traditional bookworms and members of the scientific world are battling to fight for a return of the slow reading movement, a cue taken from the slow food movement. It is argued that the Internet does not provide the same comprehension as printed paper does and the brain is merely a pedestrian standing in this new world, where we are moulding it to perform tasks which are far from realistic.

Organising your eye movements to generate a torrent of information at super sonic speed can be neither beneficial nor result in an efficient understanding of the material. Traditionally the brain reads in linear fashion, by turning pages and every so often a picture might accompany the text. However, online reading includes added guests such as; pop up ads, featured recommended reading links (I’m already being told what to read next), flashing images, hideous page layout, videos alongside words, hyperlinked text and the scrolling up and down format. I am tired only explaining these distractions. You cannot be expected to diligently digest anything you read online.

Have you noticed how online sentences tend to be shorter that those in traditional novels? Twitter is a great example of this. The restrictions on characters for each tweet oblige us to condense the message and as efficient as this may seem on your summarising skills, the flip side deteriorates your ability to keep up with winding clauses full of background information in a juicy novel.

Hash tags are another problem the youth is facing. Students are actually creating paragraphs comprised exclusively of hash tags, emulating a social media status update. I personally find over hash tagging gives me a #hashtagheadache! The fact is that words are not spaced out and our brain has to adjust to this novel way of reading text.

Convoluted syntax is discouraged online as it takes up characters, this is forcing the human brain to get used to reading a brisk 140 character declarative sentences.

Will we lose our ability to read detailed fiction? Will we develop Twitter brains?

Conclusions

The good news is there are advantages to both screen and print reading, as I have explained in this article. The question lies in what is going to be more beneficial in the long run? Well, it’s obvious the screens are not leaving us anytime soon. Therefore, it’s best we adjust quickly to the new methods.

Our children are growing up exposed far more to screen reading than we will ever be. An example is the research they carry out for their projects, which is predominantly performed online. Perhaps what they will develop is what’s referred to as a bi-literate brain. Both forms of reading, allowing them to smoothly flow between both methods, will largely influence their comprehension skills.

I do believe however that there is a paramount need to carry out further research in this field and brain scan data needs to be monitored both on print as well as online reading. It’s true that a traditional novel will never go out of fashion, with modern adaptions towards the E-book reader. I support the latter, especially to save space and remedy the numerous dust allergies faced by so many individuals.

What remains unchanged is the benefit these novels provide towards slowing down our pace and encouraging the slow reading movement. Aren’t our lives fast enough? If reading can slow us down a little bit and also help us process information more efficiently, then I advocate the slow reading.

My own experience has taught me that no matter how many articles I read everyday on my phone and tablet, I will still crave my novel and it certainly slows me down and actually helps me to process my thoughts better, thus allowing me to use the many wonderful words or sentence structures I learn from the complicated fiction Dickens and Austen have gifted us with.