I am reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and can highly recommend it.
Often questioning the effects of technology ends up branding you with the label “Luddite”. I am hardly a Luddite, but I have always been concerned about this issue. I think it is a matter of teaching reading techniques that deal with the new realities of reading in a hyperlinked world. So far, I’ve not seen much written about this. Perhaps I am not searching correctly. If any of you are reading experts – I would love to see some research and techniques for teaching reading in a hyperlinked world. Any literacy coaches out there??
I am thinking about installing Instapaper and Readability icons on all our browser bars here in the library and teaching kids to use them to print a “clean copy” of articles. The point is not just to save ink, but to save brains, helping people focus more on the text, and spend a little less time chasing links. I love that Readability will put the footnotes (hyperlinks) at the bottom. I like Instapaper because I can save articles, organize them in folders, and read them later on my iPad. Now, if they both would just do the whole job, I’d really be happy!
I also plan to test-drive placing my links at the bottom of my posts, rather than embedding them within the body.
So — to that end…
Links referenced above:
Some other articles of interest.
Experiments in delinkification
YOUR BRAIN ON COMPUTERS: Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price New York Times.
Reading as a Participation Sport
Kids AND adults are having trouble focusing on one train of thought. First in a series of articles from the NYTimes
Your Brain on Computers: Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price
The Future of Reading – My Delicious Account Bookmarks. I plan to tag all the articles I find under “future of reading.”
Birkerts, Sven. ”The truth about reading: it’s easy to blame technology for our younger generation’s declining interest in literature. But what, if anything, can be done about it?.” School Library Journal 50.11 (Nov 2004): 50(3). Business and Company ASAP. Gale. Gananda High School. 30 Apr. 2009
Gale Document #: A124941809
Finally, here is the RSS feed to my “future of reading” folder on Instapaper, should you be masochistic enough to add it to your news reader.
Hello!
I liked the links at the end! I read extensively on the web, but I do find it harder to read with serious concentration when links are sprinkled throughout the text. I have no problem reading on a screen per se–I think it’s the links and not the screen that my brain finds distracting. I’m adding “The Shallows” to my reading list…offline.
…but I can’t resist adding, after thinking a bit, that the “hyperlink effect” happens in print, too. I much prefer reading Austen or Dickens on an e-reader than on paper, because there are no footnote numbers and asterisks every few paragraphs. Just try reading almost any edition of a Shakespeare play: the flow of the text is interrupted every few seconds so the editors can tell me another obscure fact that makes no difference in my understanding of the action of the play. And I find it just as hard to resist dipping into the rest of the World Almanac after retrieving one fact as it is to resist the siren song of the hyperlinks in a Wikipedia article.
I am so glad to hear from you. Your blog has been quiet for awhile. Or perhaps you have a new one that I haven’t found yet?
Anyway… I too have always found footnotes to be very distracting when I read. I think the links at the end is a nice compromise when it comes to online reading. With print, The only thing to do is get a version without all the distractions I guess.
I also prefer the portrait orientation, and the ability to sit in a comfy chair to read. So…links at the bottom, the clen text provided by Instapaper and the iPad allowing me the portrait view is the “perfect storm” I needed to get into reading ebooks and reading online articles without printing them first.