How my grandmother reads online
I received an email from my grandmother this week in response to an Atlantic article (“Is Google making us stupid”) I’d sent her a few weeks ago. She has her PhD in education and spent her career teaching teachers how to teach kids how to read. I was curious how she thought technology might be affecting the way we read and write. She’s often told me that she hated writing until she got a computer about ten years ago. In response to the she wrote:
“I realized that my “reading” on my screen was skimming; I got the point, but could not quote one single sentence. How different from the skimming (and I confess much of my reading is that dating back to my speed reading days) I do with print in my hands. In that case I read and reread portions which intrigue/please me and can often quote later if I want to. Isn’t it interesting what unwitting changes in our behavior can occur without our noticing the change! “
I hadn’t even thought about that internet reading/skimming might affect how and if we remember information. Some people must be thinking about this, as I’ve seen quite a few articles and posts about how to write online. Bulleted listed, links, bold words and the like. But what about the writing, like that Atlantic article, that was meant for print but also ends up online? The article itself suggests, and my grandmother concurs, that we’d read and process it differently. Which maybe doesn’t matter. Or maybe it does. I wonder if many writers think about how their words will be read as they compose them. In a time when so much content does end up online, it will be interesting to see if and how the writing and editing process will evolve to address how our reading differs between screen and print.