Yeah, but...

The Future of Books
http://futureofthebook.com/storiestoc/hand

From The Future of the Book, a blog/website dedicated to exploring issues of reading and the transition from paper to screen.

"It is apparent that the action of computer keyboard manipulation leads not to kinetic insight, but to repetitive motion syndrome. ... Watch yourself reading. You will find that you begin to turn the page at the start of the page reading and that your fingers will glide under the leaf to coincide the page turning with the completed page reading. You will also find, pages later, that you can recall the physical location of an encountered idea."

"Isn't it then possible that conceptual transactions are embodied to paper because this act itself mimics the deep efficiency of discovering concepts by physical manipulation?"

Finally the blogger mentions a study from waaaay back in September 2000 which discovered that college students who read essays on a computer screen found the text harder to understand, less interesting, and less persuasive than students who read the same essays on paper. Link to that study, and a quote from it:

"[W]e think readers develop strategies about how to remember and comprehend printed texts, but these students were unable to transfer those strategies to computerized texts."

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/comptext.htm

Posted by: bill jomes on February 24, 2007 10:01 PM

Thanks for the reference!

There is always the possibility that the digital revolution will advance paper based reading as much or more than screen based reading.

Posted by: Gary Frost on February 25, 2007 11:52 AM

I certainly prefer readng anything interresting that is longer on paper, not on the scren. But for bills and stock reports I am beginning to prefer not to havemy mailbox vrowded and pull it up on screen..if only they didn't want so many frigging passwords etc to even get your car insurance payment report

Posted by: ccsmith on March 15, 2007 3:19 PM






Post a comment

Name:


Email Address:


URL:


Comments:


Remember your info?