Oh, how innocent this man looks—Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Given the powers of time travel, why might a book-lover go back to snuff Sir Tim out before he invented the Web?
Could it be because the Web often can be toxic for immersive reading, the old-fashioned kind where you don’t just flit around but really lose yourself in an author’s thoughts and your own? Yes, the Web is a wonderful research tool. But in some ways, along with television, it just might be more of a threat to sustained thought than, say, video games—a medium I had in mind when I conceived TeleRead. The idea behind the TeleRead plan was and is to try to build an e-book culture into our schools and libraries so that people are more likely to read and think at length. The best place for encouraging any kind of book culture is the home. But a little help from institutions can’t hurt, so the process is less haphazard.
Ammo from the U.K.
Now, from the U.K. comes new ammunition for me—a study by the researchers at the British Library and University College London, who, according to John Naughton, in the U.K. Guardian, “combined a review of published literature on the information-seeking behaviour of young people more than 30 years with a five-year analysis of the logs of a British Library website and another popular research site that documents people’s behaviour in finding and reading information online.
“The findings describe ‘a new form of information-seeking behaviour’ characterised as being ‘horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature. Users are promiscuous, diverse and volatile.’ ‘Horizontal’ information-seeking means ‘a form of skimming activity, where people view just one or two pages from an academic site then “bounce” out, perhaps never to return.’ The average times users spend on e-book and e-journal sites are very short: typically four and eight minutes respectively.” So much for the Gutenberg Man, eh?
You can download the full study here, in, grrr, PDF format. Also check out a link-rich press release from the British Library, which notes that professors, too, not just younger people, want instant gratification in their quests for information. So will this be the era of blogs and books that might as well be blogs? That both delights and horrifies me. I’m a blogger, but I’m also the author of a quirky manuscript with two obsolete features, a foreword and an epilogue; and the scuttlebutt I hear, at least about the foreword, is that many fiction publishers don’t want such anachronisms these days. Might the Web mindset have something to do with this?
Ending on a cheerier note
Meanwhile, to end on a cheery note, from a commercial e-book perspective, a subhead in the study mentions “The inexorable rise of the e-book,” and the authors predict: “Outside of leisure markets, we expect print sales to diminish sharply as electronic publishing initiatives such as blogs, RSS, integrated media players, pod casting and publishing-on-demand devices become established parts of the information landscape.
“Electronic books, driven by consumer demand, will finally become established as the primary format for educational textbooks and scholarly books and monographs, as well as reference formats.
“However the most significant impact for research will not be how things get published, but how they get accessed. In particular OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) technology will allow the widespread publishing of information on demand, wirelessly delivered to an incredibly niche demographic. This kind of publishing will be a potential headache for both research activity and archiving, since these publications can literally appear and disappear in an instant.” Exactly the kind of thing that a TeleRead-style approach, with fixed, reliable links, could address!
The irony of the moment: The report’s use of the PDF format, which got in the way of my full absorption of the material. I was distracted by the process of positioning the study on my screen. Far better to have used a reflowable format like HTML or, in time, .epub. Yes, I could print out the report, but isn’t that a little silly, given how it reached me?
I’ve always believed that reasoning ability and immersive reading behavior are orthogonal to each other. Certainly immersive reading of the right materials may aid in reasoning ability (note the use of the word “may”), depending upon what is read. But it is not necessary. We could just as well hypothesize that the habit of taking in information in tidbits as most typically do on the web today improves reasoning ability since the person has to process and interrelate all that information from a number of independent sources – in immersive reading we pretty much follow the “finished” reasoning of one person.
Until we have definitive studies to test this hypothesis, we can’t say anything beyond stating a personal belief – David’s view is as much of a belief as mine. The study mentioned by David Rothman was not intended to resolve this hypothesis, and does not do so.
On a related topic, I’ve observed that historically only a small percentage of the populace have immersively read as a habit, and I believe it is related to basic personality and interests which are essentially hard-wired at birth and/or very early in life. “Education”, “cajoling” and even “forced reading” will not make the majority of people want to immersively read. A person develops the habit of immersive reading because it is in some way addictively pleasurable to them, and I believe for the majority of people it will never be pleasurable in an addictive way no matter how much they do it out of necessity or interest-at-the-moment, and what they immersively read.
Even if they read something that they greatly enjoy at the time they read it, it does not necessarily lead to developing the habit. Some will, most won’t. (A corollary of what David is saying is that everyone will develop the immersive reading habit provided they are introduced to it in a positive way, and with this I greatly disagree – what we can say for certain is that we just don’t know.)
Now one might argue that with today’s fast-paced world where we obtain lots of information in tiny tidbits, that those who would develop the immersive reading habit given the opportunity, will not do so. I reject this since one can and will immersively read from a lot of content found on the Web, and so there’s enough opportunity for those people to get “hooked” and continue to seek out more immersive reading material to feed their habit.
And finally we come back full circle as to whether the immersive type of reading, which David believes is critical, is really that important. Again, we do not yet have the definitive, scientific answer, and I’m not sure it is an answerable question.
(It would be an interesting study to test the hypothesis that people are now reading more than they were before the Internet became ubiquitous. I believe people are reading more, and I think more people believe this to be good, regardless as to what they are reading, and how.)
Fortunately, from the commercial publisher’s viewpoint, there will always be a market for immersive-type content, primarily fiction. Even if only 10% of the general public immersively reads as a habit, that means over 30 million readers in the U.S., which is still a huge, multibillion dollar market. And even those who don’t have the immersive reading addiction will buy the occasional book because the topic is very important to them at the moment – they read for the information, not because of habit, and I believe we have to differentiate between the two.
(I personally know a few people who are immersive reading addicts, and they themselves would agree that they are “book addicts.” If one is to become addicted to something, books is one of the few positive addictions to have.)
Hi, Jon—good to see you present a different viewpoint. For more on my own, people can see Norman Mailer and E. Sustained narrative or elaborately developed exposition, if read immersively, can help people make sense of events and life. Thanks. David
There’s a huge body of research in so-called “sensemaking”, interpreted in a number of different ways, but usually as the process a person (or group of people) goes through in making sense of life (or some more focussed topic). In general, it tends to support Jon’s comments (which are pretty vanilla 🙂 ).
Personally, I tend to believe that immersive reading is mostly about leisure-time entertainment activity. Reading for meaning typically involves breaks, for thinking or consulting other sources or writing something down. So I believe that they are two different kinds of activities.
The reference to Mailer’s comment is interesting. It’s not about reading, per se; instead, he’s commenting on the frequent interruption for commercials, and claiming that those interruptions destroys the narrative stream of the program. I’m not sure that’s true of TV; I think kids learn pretty early on to mentally “pause” the program for commercials, and pick up the narrative thread (such as it may be) when the program resumes.
But there’s another problem which I think may be serious, and that’s the one touched on in the NEA report. Immersive reading, even of fiction, is practice; it trains one in the mechanics of reading, of how words are spelled, how phrases are assembled. Without this practice, reading for meaning, and writing for communication, may be harder.
If a tt killed Berners-Lee, he’d still have to go after Ted Nelson, who envisioned it well before Lee *did* it. Even now, the WWW pales next to Ted’s vision.
Good point, Mike. But keep in mind that, while TN’s vision was more elaborate, TB-L made his happen more successfully and on a far wider scale. I guess the Traveler can do in both. David
Good point, Mike. But keep in mind that, while TN’s vision was more elaborate, TB-L made his happen more successfully and on a far wider scale. I guess the Traveler can do in both. David
Don’t forget Vannevar Bush, who started all this trouble. Damn eggheads. I’d be out in the fresh air getting beat up. Instead I’m inside safe in front of a keyboard. What kind of madness is this?
I’d also question whether the Net is inherently opposed to “sustained thought”; indeed, I’ve just recently seen a number of sites that use the Web to bring together sustained thought and close reading on online texts. I just wrote about some of them in a blog post: “Close Readers”.