Reconceptualizing

Reading in The Digital Age

Mohamed Kharbach

27-01-2016

What is reading?

Literacy practice

‘Literacy practices are the general cultural ways of

utilizing written language which people draw upon in their

lives. In the simplest sense literacy practices are what people do

with literacy.’ (Barton, Hamilton & Ivanic, 2002, KL. 423)

1- Is reading in the digital age

different from reading in previous

ages? If so, why is it different?

!

2- What are some of its implications

for us as teachers and educators?

Psychodynamics of reading

Diachronic over view of reading history

19th-20th 1500BC 1450 21st century

centuries

Technology of

writing

( Alphabet system

1500BC, Ong,

2012)

Printing Press

around 1450

(Naughton, 2014)

Electric media (TV,

Radio, Telephone…

etc, Mcluhan, 1994)

Information

communication

technologies and

social media

1- Technology of Writing

* Orality and Literacy (Ong, 2012).

* Earliest script dates back to

6000 years ago (Ibid).

* Literacy starts with writing

and human society becomes literate

very late in history.

* Reading precedes writing.

* The human brain and the reading

paradox (Dehaene, 2009).

Impact of writing on human cognition:

*Learning: apprenticeship, discipleship, repetition .

Learning Vs Studying.

*Thinking: Concrete and analytic Vs abstract,

sequential and classificatory thinking.

*Remembering and storing knowledge: mnemonic

internalization, external storage. (Ong, 2012)

*Literate versus illiterate thinking patterns.

Alphabets emerged around 1500BC

Alphabetic writing and onset of literacy

reading as a social privilege.

2- Printing Press

J o h a n n e s G u t e n b e r g

introduced printing press

to the West around

1400 (Naughton, 2014).

Mass production of books,

m a n u s c r i p t s ,

m e m o i r s , l e a f l e t s ,

notebooks…etc

Mass literacy Boon in

science

Modernity /

Renaissance.

* Reading becomes a skill with rules and

regulations.

* It encouraged silent reading which

becomes a commonality. Modern reading

becomes a silent and solitary activity

(Saenger, 1997).

3- Electric media

!

* Electric media, as Mcluhan stated, ‘has

broken the tyranny of text over our

thoughts and senses’.

* Death of the ‘linear mind’.

, - -_

--- -:.,

• >- .-

4- Web technologies and social media

RADI MUNICATION

OS CONTENT

SOCIAL MEDIA WORK

* The social web has redefined our

reading habits.

* Reading is done in short bursts of

attention

* Irony: abundant reading materials

———surface reading.

In an age that values speed and

hyper connectivity, reading

thoughtfully and deeply becomes a

daunting challenge. \

As Ulin (2010) stated, “to read we

need a certain kind of silence, an

ability to filter out noise”(KL. 338).

4- Reading in a Hurried Age

* Continuous Partial Attention

(CPA) versus multitasking.

!

* Multitasking: “we pair one

activity that is fairly automatic

with another that requires more

attention.” (Linda Stone cited in

David, 2013)

!

* CPA is “an always on, anywhere,

anytime, any place behaviour that

creates an artificial sense of crisis.

We are always in high alert .”

Impact of hyper connectivity on reading

1- Ulin, David

eading

HY HOOKS

[ DJS"rKA(..THD I

David L. U lin

“For most of my life, I have read...primarily at night: a

hundred or so pages every evening once Rae and the

kids have gone to bed. These days, after spending hours

on t he co mputer, I p ick u p a bo ok and read a

paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my email,

drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning

to the page. Or I want to do these things but don’t,

force myself to remain still, to follow what I am

reading until I give myself over to the flow.” He further

added, ‘what I’m struggling with is the encroachment of

the buzz, the sense that there is something out there

that merits my attention, when in fact it’s mostly

just a series of disconnected riffs, quick takes and

fragments, that add up to the anxiety of the age” (KL.

338).

* O b s e ssi o n w i t h ‘ i n f o r m at i o n a l

novelty’

Checking becomes an end itself.

!

* B.F. Skinner called it ‘Intermittent

reinforcement’. (see Jacob, 1958)

!

* Sam Anderson went even further to

claim that “the Internet is basically

a Skinner box engineered to tap

right i nto o u r d e e p e s t m e c h a n i s m

s o f addiction.” (Jacob, KL. 1087).

2- Nicholas Carr

!

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense

that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my

brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the

memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s

changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can

feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in

a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would

get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument,

and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose.

That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often

starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the

thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if

I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The

deep reading that used to come naturally has become a

struggle.” (Carr, KL. 142).”

3- Alan Jacob

E_

“I get twitchy within just a few minutes of

sitting down with a book I have noticed that

my hand will start reaching for my iPhone

without my consciously telling it to, as

though I am becoming a digital-era… I

realized that I was reading fewer

books than I had since age ten, and reading

them less well with less attention and

therefore getting less pleasure from the

reading (Kl.

1044)”

Main argument

New techno log ies are rew iring o ur

b r a i n s a n d cre at i ng n e w re ad i ng

habits. We are getting accustomed to a

new mode of reading that consists of

scanning short passages from multiple

sources online.

In return for the riches of the Internet, we are

trading our ‘old linear thought process’. as

Carr stated, ‘the calm, focused, undistracted ,

linear mind is being pushed aside by a new

disjointed, often overlapping bursts-the faster, the

better (Kl. l218).

Impact of web technologies on the

reading brains of digital natives

*Hayles, professor at Duke

university, confessed “I can’t get my

students to read whole books

anymore.” (see Carr,

2010, KL. 191).

!

*For some people, as Carr declared. “the

very idea of reading a book has come to

seem old-fashioned, may be even a little

silly, like sewing your own shirts or

butchering your own meat” (KL, 191).

“In 2008, a research and consulting outfit called

nGenera released a study of the effects of the Internet

use on the young. The company inter viewed some six

thousand members of what it calls “Generation Net”—

ki d s w ho have g ro w n u p u sing t he W eb. “ Dig i tal

immersion,” wrote the lead researcher, “has even affected

the way they absorb information. They don’t necessarily

read a page from left to right and from top to bottom.

They might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent

information of interest.” (Carr, 2010, KL. 203).

* It’s not about technological nihilism it’s

about the impact of this technology on the

human thought.

!

* ’The medium is the message’ (Mcluhan,

1994).

!

* The technology we use in our daily

interaction “makes us think along certain

path-dependent lines” (Ong, 2012, KL. 273).

* The medium is just as important as the

content itself. For Mcluhan the content of

the a medium is just “the juicy piece of

meat carried by the burglar to distract the

watchdog of the mind” (se Carr, 2010, KL.

125).

!

* Two examples:

A- Reading on social media websites,

B- Nietzsche “our writing equipment

takes part in the forming of our

thoughts. (see Carr, KL. 345).

Main thesis

* New technologies have a huge impact on

how we read.

* They are rewiring our brains and creating

new reading habits.

* They have diminished deep, thoughtful,

ruminative, and slow reading (you can’t

read slowly because you will succumb to

distraction before you make it to the

second or third page.

!

7- The uploading model of reading !

Jacob (1958) argues that ‘most people read quickly

because they want not to be read but to

have read.”And for the reason why is this so, he

added “they conceive of reading simply as a

means of uploading information to their brains” (Kl.

937).

!

Good for reading a cookbook or

a software manual

Students read instrumentally, for an

external reason (e.g. grade)

Levels of Reading ( Adler & Van

Doren, 1972)

Elementary

reading

Inspectional

reading

Analytical

reading

Synoptical

reading

Purposes of reading

Reading for

information

Reading for

understanding

Reading for

pleasure

considerations…!!!

* Informational Environmentalism

(Ulin, 2010).

* ’cultivate unhurried activities and quiet

places, sanctuaries in time and space for

refle ctio n and co ntemplatio n’. (Ul in,

2010, KL. 815).

* Technological Sabbath (Ibid).

* Read with focus, attentiveness and

discernment.

References:

-Adler, M.J., & Van Doren, C. (1972). How to read a book:The

Classic guide to intelligent reading.USA:Touchstone Book.

-Barton, D.,Hamilton, M.,& Ivanic, R. (Eds.). (2002). Situated

literacies: Theorising reading and writing in context. London:

Routledge.

-Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our

brains. New York: Norton & Company.

-David, M. (2013). Slow reading in a hurried age. England: The

Belknap Press of Har vard University Press.

-Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the brain: The New science of

how we read. New York: Penguin Group.

-Jacob, A. (1958).The Pleasures of reading in an age of

distraction.New York: Oxford University Press

-Mcluhan, M.(1994). Understanding media: The extensions

of man. California: The MIT Press

-Naughton, J.(2014). From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg:

Disruptive innovation in the Aae of the Internet. United

States: Quercus.

-Ong, W. (2012). Orality and literacy. New York:Routledge.

Saenger, P. (1997).Space between words: The origins of

silent reading. California: Stanford University Press.

-Tapscott, D. (2008). How to teach and manage

‘Generation Net’. BusinessWeekOnline. http://goo.gl/

DGIZJ2 (accessed 20 january, 2016))

-Ulin, D. (2010). The Lost art of reading: Why books matter

in a distracted time. Seattle, WA: Sasquatch Books

Image sources:

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