Richard, hi. I saw your post over at Bill Hill’s blog re my screening idea. thanks for the note about Cory D’s screeny word. i didn’t know that before. I will email him right now. he usually answers my emails. Someimes he doesn’t. Same with mark Fraufelder. Anwyays, i liked your comment at Bill’s blog and want to chat with you MORE about what I am doing with this idea and WHY….i am not so much proposing a new word, whatever that new word might be, if indeed we even need a new word for what we do on screen, i am just posing the question, to get people thinking about how different reading on paper is versus reading on a screen, and i hate screen reading. I have to print out everything to read it on paper. but for emails and blogs and drudge it’s perfect and yes i hope someone like Bill can make the readabliity factor PERFECT for future screens. he is a genius. — Danny in Taiwan, far from the madding crowd….

Alex Beam: Screening and reading

from the Boston Globe on June 19

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-salability 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 plunging 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 paper, 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 columnist for The Boston Globe.

Q. & A.

Please post this whichever dept it belongs, and don’t say where the sun don’t shine. Smile. I am just curious what folks think about all this and here is a chance to answer: If you don;t want to answer here, too long or whatever, PM me okay.

1. Since reading on paper is very different from reading on screens,
do you think that at some point it might be useful , maybe, to coin a new word in English
for “reading on screens”, ……yes or no?

2. If yes , …..can you suggest any possible words for this new word: maybe
scanning? screen-reading? screening? any other words you can think of
that might work well here, words or terms?

3. A futurist inthe USA , a very well known person, tells me:
“Screening” is not a new term, but this might just be the time that it
catches on, given the imminent arrival of Apple’s iPad, and other
devices. The last time I heard it — screening — in this way — was
back in the late 1990s when the RocketBook and Softbook made their
debut, but the term didn’t do any better than the products did.”

do you agree with him that THIS might be the time SCREENING catches
on? Yes or no or comments?

4. This furturist told me “This time around, screening is a clever and
useful term capturing the fact
that the experience reading on a screen is fundamentally different
from reading on paper. Not a priori worse or better; just different.”
Do you agree with him here, yes or no or comments?

5. This futurist also told me …”So definitley SCREENING is the right
word for the moment in terms of drawing
people’s attention to the vast literary shift about to wash over
us….Do you agree that we are now witnessing a vast literary shift
about to wash over us? YES NO MAYBE? COMMENTS?

6. Is there any research yet that speaks about the way that different
parts of the brain light up when people read on paper compared to when
they read on a screen? Has anyone studied it this way yet? Can it be
studied this way? Do you think it is possible that different parts of
the brain light up when we read on paper vs reading on screens? Might
PHD people do research on this in the future.? how could one conduct
such research? with MRI machines? brain scans?

7. Does reading on screens hamper or hinder our critical analysis
skills of what we are reading?

8. If in the future most reading is done on screens, from computers to
iPhones to Kindles to even textbooks on screens, could this hurt the
critical thinking skills of young people to think, analyze and asess
information?

9. Do you think people will be reading on paper surfaces anymore in
the year 2050? in the year 2099?

10. Are you willing or ready to say goodbye to MR PAPER, and greet
the SCREEN AGE with a complete open-minded welcome?