There’s been such an onslaught of opinions and articles about reading online that I’m almost hesitant to comment further on the subject, but after reading the latest NY Times article I have to make two points.
First, the difference between online reading and print reading has been described in many ways, but at least one major one is Fragmentary Reading versus Sustained Reading. Online reading involves brevity and jumping around, while sustained reading is concentrating on a book for prolonged periods of time. This distinction has its merits, but ignores the heavy overlap between the two. I’d like to suggest that serial reading — reading of a particular source, whether it be a newspaper, magazine, column, or blog — is a form of sustained reading, and that serial reading happens quite often online.
By returning day after day and week after week to a particular column or blog, I develop a longstanding relationship with the content of that source, using previous knowledge and incorporating it with forthcoming knowledge in a manner quite similar to the relationship of sustained reading. The key difference (which you’re probably already thinking of) is attention span: with a book, sustained reading happens in, say, a thirty minute or hour stretch, while with the internet, that reading happens in shorter blips, encouraging brief attention spans, yet stretching over a long period of time.
Second, comparing cheap online pharmacy no prescription online reading and print reading is not as helpful as comparing Online Reading to Conversations. In other words, reading online is less like absorbing words silently and more like verbal interaction. When comparing online reading to print reading, online reading often comes out looking like the junior cousin: less serious, more dilly-dallying, flippant and juvenile. But when comparing online reading to conversations, it seems much more organic to humanity’s natural discursive practices. We interrupt, we start listening to someone else, we start and stop, we interject. By incorporating increasingly truncated articles, hyperlinks, cross-reading, and comment boards, we’re really not “writing” or “reading” (at least not in the grand, elevated manner of thinking about writing and reading). We’re just talking through keyboards. This recognition frees us from conventional modes of thinking about writing and reading, letting us embrace many of the conversations occurring online as an electronic version of the front porch. It’s chatting with people of like interests. The orthodox thinking would always privilege the written word above verbal interaction. But as I mentioned in a commentary on Andrew Keen, this hierarchy of writing as more sacred than conversation is false and constricting. There’s nothing inherently substandard about a form of communication that more closely approximates a verbal exchange than marks on a page.
I know these two points seem somewhat contradictory: first I say these forms of reading are more similar than they appear, and next I say that they’re more different. I just want to point out exceptions to some of the prevailing opinions on the topic, because reading online — at least serially — can be quite sustained, and when it is fragmentary, we should regard it as a spirited conversation, one which never fails to amuse or inform.
