THE OPEN COLUMN: Learning to read ... again

Download as PDF

When I was young, life was simple. Or should I say, reading was simple. Am I getting old? Certainly, but looking at the pace things have changed over the last two decades, this statement is true even for my students. What I mean is, that after seamlessly accepting all the technological advances supporting consumption of the digital content, we are starting to have problems with reading. I believe it is not even clear what we mean by reading anymore. Let me explain why.

It is clear digitalization of content brought endless possibilities of accessing, searching, sharing, comparing, tagging, citing etc. etc. With powerful search engines and other tools on top and scalable databases on the storage level, it seems our productivity should spike dramatically. Yet, beyond specialized, man-maintained databases and digital libraries, the rest of the Internet grew to become the new Wild West and visions such as Semantic Web, which try to structure it, are not likely to materialize in the near future. I am not trying to say that Internet is useless of course, nor trying to argue the opposing voices glorifying the freedom of speech and expression likely to be heard here. The point I want to make is that we are facing heterogeneity of form, ambiguity of source and variety of quality in the Web resources that is overwhelming.

All off the above has strongly influenced the way we process textual content. Humans as intelligent species quickly realized that reading carefully all that was published on the Web by other individuals is neither feasible nor effective, so they started to surf (those who did not are probably still stuck reading or already starved to death; either way they will not pass their genes to the next generation). The verb “to surf” wonderfully captures the essence of our activity when we relate it to the textual content. We navigate through the mass of interlinked documents and scan them quickly for key words until we find something interesting, read a sentence or two, then we move on. Likewise other verbs like skipping (omitting large parts of text we consider irrelevant) or nexting (from the next button in Chatroulette), describe nicely the nature of our actions.

The reality is even more complex. Depending on the task we are performing, we conduct the process described above quite differently. Whether reading an e-mail, looking for help on a forum, scanning RSS feeds or finding out what's up in our social network, the way we process text is very different. What we observe is that the activity we have been calling reading has evolved into a group of activities, which for the best performance require a different set of skills, specialized applications and in some cases even dedicated devices. One can argue, that this phenomenon has always been present to some extent. After all reading a poem is different then reading a newspaper or a novel. The difference is that with the help of technology, we have pushed the boundaries of processing the textual content much further then it was even imaginable in the pre-Internet era. As a result, various activities we conduct differ much more significantly then it used to be in the past.

Another important aspect which have changed our reading experience is dynamics of new media. Even if we forget about all the multimedia that is usually attached to the text content, what is left is still very much alive. Hyperlinks can take us quickly to other related resources. Context aware highlighting or pop-ups bring additional data and explanation. Furthermore, the text itself changes rapidly. If I put a newspaper on my desk, I will have the whole day to digest the front page story. At the same time the Internet news portal will change the headline more often than I can notice. These dynamics also strongly influence our reading habits. We are not too much attached to majority of the information we read as it gets outdated fast and disappears or is pushed down to archive pages. At the same time if we find something really interesting we have an urge to remember it or store it somehow or at least bookmark for future reference.

The problems I mentioned in the beginning are rooted in this heterogeneity of actions and content dynamics. As a scientist, I have to sit down quite often and do some good old school reading. Discovering that there is no search button on my book is the least of my problems (although more and more often I have a physical urge to push it). In a near future most of the valuable literature will be digitalized and available on eBook readers. The real problem, which has also been reported by other people, is that after the daily dose of browsing through the Web, I sit down with my book and having read a couple of pages I realize I have no idea what it is about! I surf it rather then read, which does not give me enough insight into the important content. The actions are so different, that they require a conscious switch, which my brain fails to perform assuming all that time I was just... reading.

Throughout my education I was taught the old-fashioned reading style. Apparently I have to relearn to do it and I am sure being aware of the underlying problems and my goals will help much. But what about my students or even younger people? They absorb instantly all the new possibilities that new technologies bring about and use them in an innovative way. At the same time we often hear teachers lamenting over poor performance of children in working with traditional texts. Obviously they are facing similar problems as we are, only that they have had no chance to learn proper reading before clinging to the Internet and all the new media. They start right in the world of what we can call polylection. How can we help them identify and manage different ways of working with written text? How can we convince them about the benefits of the traditional reading? Finally, how do we help them to bridge the gap between the old and the new? We have to seek the answers if we want to stay credible. And if we succeed it will surely be helpful in our own struggles.

About the Author

Dominik Ryzko

Assistant Professor, Institute of Computer Science, Warsaw University of Technology

Dominik Ryzko is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Computer Science at the Warsaw University of Technology, specializing in the area of artificial intelligence and databases. He gives lectures on Multi-Agent Systems and Database Systems. Dr Ryzko participated in several projects aimed at practical application of scientific research in business. He has over 10 years of professional experience in the IT industry, having worked as an IT consultant, system architect and project manager in major international corporations (Oracle, Accenture).