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Out of touch with the page means we are literally out of touch with what we are reading. posted by Jason Ohler |
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I Screen, You Screen, We All Screen
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Does reading on any two-dimensional flat surface amount to the same experience? No - tactility counts. McLuhan was all over tactility because it helped re-tribalize post-literature cultures.
Globe columnist Alex Bean is all over it too. In his Boston Globe article, "I screen, you screen, we all screen," he references a number of sources on this issue, including Jakob Nielsen, a Web usability researcher, who reports that we generally read 25 percent more slowly on the screen. But the truly interesting findings come from a Norwegian researcher, Anne Mangen, who finds screen reading and paper reading are very different. She writes:
“The feeling of literally being in touch with the text is lost when your actions - clicking with the mouse, pointing on touch screens, or scrolling with keys or on touch pads - take place at a distance from the digital text, which is, somehow, somewhere inside the computer, the e-book, or the mobile phone...Materiality matters. . . . One main effect of the intangibility of the digital text is that of making us read in a shallower, less focused way.’’
That is, when we don't touch something, we don't connect as well with it. Reading, usually considered a mental activity, has a physical - if not sensual - component to it. Harder to love from afar than up close.
Beam also quotes William Powers: “It (text on paper) becomes a still point, an anchor for the consciousness. It’s a trick the digital medium hasn’t mastered - not yet.’’
Beam's article is a very telling read.
(Image sources: Rare book from the Royal Library, Amazon Kindle picture)
