Fragmented information

As a mother to a four-month old (and a soon to be five-year-old) I find my days fragmented by interruptions: the cursor is left blinking vacuously mid-sentence, the carelessly pushed-back chair at the table abandoned regularly, the half-read paragraph left draped in fast-evaporating thoughts that won't exist anymore when I finally get back to reading it. Things are left half-drunk, half-eaten, forgotten, abandoned, partially thought-through, quietly wilted due to lack of attention. I leave behind me a trail of uncompleted things.

It seems futile to pick up something of any substance.

Recently, I've noticed that this attitude has permeated how I read. I reach for my phone to scroll through my twitter feed instead of picking up my book. I choose short instead of long, the sound-bite instead of the whole story. Online reading is overflowing with short, easily-digestible chunks of text, where thoughts can flit from idea to idea without having to delve too deeply or permanently on anything. It's perfect for interruptions. At least then, I reason, I can actually feel like I've finished something.

Books require more commitment and are geared towards a continuous, linear thought-process. The reader must make the effort to reconstruct the writer's original thoughts, patiently follow their trail and add to them through some level of critical engagement. It's interesting to me how print and online reading use the same decoding process but result in two different types of reading and, ultimately, two different ways of thinking. Ironically, I came across an article on Why reading on a screen is bad for critical thinking on my twitter feed the other day. I skimmed it (as I do when reading on my phone between a number of unfinished tasks) and made a point of re-reading it later on my laptop.

Noami Baron writes, "The ways we use technologies lead us to develop particular habits of mind. With print, even though we might skim and scan, the default mindset is continuous reading. It's also focusing on what we're reading, even though sometimes our thoughts wander. Digital technologies engender a different set of habits and practices. Their default state is what I call reading on the prowl. Think of how much time you spend on each hit after doing a Google search. A minute? Ten seconds? And how likely are you to be multitasking while reading onscreen?"

This really resonated with me. I have to confess to becoming "a reader on the prowl". I roam aimlessly around, following links, reading a few lines here, a few lines there, reading much but absorbing little, and getting more and more overwhelmed by the infinite sources of information coming at me in little bits and pieces. The problem is, those fragments don't add up to anything meaningful. I, the reader, am left still searching for the substance of the thing that allows the writer's original idea to take form and shape and be passed on. I'm left with a sense of incompleteness.

Time, thought, concentration and effort are needed to be an engaged reader. The internet with its temptations of hyperlinks, email and endless distraction doesn't offer fertile opportunities for doing this. 

Nor does a day punctured by interruptions.

Blurring the boundaries of "screen time"

I seem to have a bit of a soft spot for children's picture books that make a commentary on reading and interaction in the internet age (I wrote about Lane Smith's It's a book here). The newest one to come into my hands is Dot by Randi Zuckerberg and illustrated by Joe Berger. With cheerful illustrations and playful language it tells the story of a little girl called Dot, who "knows a lot". She's an ace with all different types of "screens":

Eventually Dot gets that familiar feeling of screen-time overload. She goes all cross-eyed and disorientated, so that her mom sends her to play outside.

Once outside in the sun, she remembers that she also knows how...

in the real world. The book is charming in it's reminder to leave the virtual world behind sometimes and give ourselves the opportunity to interact and play in the real one.

Having just said that, I have to admit to spending quite a bit of time reading articles via twitter on my phone (very handy with a hungry baby to feed and only one hand free). A New York Times article I recently came across asks the very pertinent question of whether E-Reading to your toddler counts as story time or screen time. The question is of course very relevant as more and more children's books are turned into interactive E-books for tablets, and parents are faced with endless choices of toddler and even baby entertainment for different screens.

According to the article, even the experts aren't sure. What is certain, is that pediatricians and child-development experts advise parents to read to their children regularly from an early age. They also advise no screen time for children under the age of two and less than two hours a day for older children. Where, then, does e-reading fall?

There doesn't seem to be much research out there yet, but the New York Times article points out that a handful of new studies suggest "reading to a child from an electronic device undercuts the dynamic that drives language development". It refers to a 2013 study, Once Upon A Time: Parent-child Dialogue and Storybook Reading in the Electronic Era, which found that 3-5 year olds whose parents read to them using a tablet had lower comprehension rates of the story than those children who were read to using a traditional book. Part of the problem, the researchers explain, was that parents and children using tablets spent more time focusing on the device than on the story. As the stories become more and more interactive in an E-format (which obviously does comes with educational advantages), the focus shifts away from the parent-child dialogue that springs up from the more old-fashioned forms of story time. Researchers have stressed that it is this early conversation around stories that assists language development. The New York Times article quotes Dr Hirsh-Pasek, who sums it up well, "In other words, it's being talked with, not being talked at that teaches children language."

So I guess, Dot does know a lot; we need to strike a healthy balance between the virtual world and the real one.

Timeless advice about reading

Seeing as I've been writing about reading recently, I have to share this timeless advice from Lewis Carroll about how to read, found via Brainpickings. It touches on a number of points I've discussed here before, namely that to truly engage with and understand more complex content, one needs to slow down and read in depth (the type of reading that is best done in print).

In this short extract from his book A Random Walk in Science, Carroll advises readers how to read critically and plunge on in spite of challenges and difficulties encountered in the text. It insightfully and charmingly shows how reading has to adapt to purpose (for example we read texts for work or study differently from how we go about reading a novel). While this book was published in 1973 (in that case well before the flood of online text and social media distractions) the advice he gives under "How to learn" still holds true for today.

"The Learner, who wishes to try the question fairly, whether this little book does, or does not, supply the materials for a most interesting mental recreation, is earnestly advised to adopt the following Rules:

1. Begin at the beginning, and do not allow yourself to gratify a mere idle curiosity by dipping into the book, here and there. This would very likely lead to your throwing it aside, with the remark “This is much too hard for me!", and thus losing the chance of adding a very large item to your stock of mental delights. This Rule (of not dipping) is very desirable with other kinds of books—-such as novels, for instance, where you may easily spoil much of the enjoyment you would otherwise get from the story, by dipping into it further on, so that what the author meant to be a pleasant surprise comes to you as a matter of course. Some people, I know, make a practice of looking into Vol. III first, just to see how the story ends: and perhaps it is as well just to know that all ends happily—that the much-persecuted lovers do marry after all, that he is proved to be quite innocent of the murder, that the wicked cousin is completely foiled in his plot and gets the punishment he deserves, and that the rich uncle in India (Qu. Why in India? Ans. Because, somehow, uncles never can get rich anywhere else) dies at exactly the right moment—-before taking the trouble to read Vol. I.
   This, I say, is just permissible with a novel, where Vol. III has a meaning, even for those who have not read the earlier part of the story; but, with a scientific book, it is sheer insanity: you will find the latter part hopelessly unintelligible, if you read it before reaching it in regular course.
2. Don’t begin any fresh Chapter, or Section, until you are certain that you thoroughly understand the whole book up to that point, and that you have worked, correctly, most if not all of the examples which have been set. So long as you are conscious that all the land you have passed through is absolutely conquered, and that you are leaving no unsolved difficulties behind you, which will be sure to turn up again later on, your triumphal progress will be easy and delightful. Otherwise, you will find your state of puzzlement get worse and worse as you proceed, till you give up the whole thing in utter disgust.
3. When you come to any passage you don’t understand, read it again: if you still don’t understand it, read it again: if you fail, even after three readings, very likely your brain is getting a little tired. In that case, put the book away, and take to other occupations, and next day, when you come to it fresh, you will very likely find that it is quite easy.
4. If possible, find some genial friend, who will read the book along with you, and will talk over the difficulties with you. Talking is a wonderful smoother-over of difficulties. When I come upon anything—in Logic or in any other hard subject—that entirely puzzles me, I find it a capital plan to talk it over, aloud, even when I am all alone. One can explain things so clearly to one’s self! And then, you know, one is so patient with one’s self: one never gets irritated at one’s own stupidity!

If, dear Reader, you will faithfully observe these Rules, and so give my little book a really fair trail, I promise you, most confidently, that you will find Symbolic Logic to be one of the most, if not the most, fascinating of mental recreations!"

I love the way these four rules, in a way that is slow and deliberate without becoming pedantic, point out a pathway to understanding that is linear, measured and ultimately honest, in that it doesn't offer a shortcut or quick solution to a task, that by its nature, just takes time.

Slow reading in an information ecology

My interest in how our reading habits are influenced and changed by the digital age lead me to John Miedema’s book Slow Reading. It’s about how we as readers make choices about how much attention we give a text, from skimming and scanning online articles or headlines to deep reading a novel for example. The point being that whatever tool we use to read does, on some level, influence how we read and think. What I like about his book is that it looks at digital and print reading as two complementary and necessary parts, that it sees a symbiotic relationship between the two and rather than the one spelling doom for the other.

In his chapter, Slow Reading in an Information Ecology, Miedema states:

“Digital technology is often preferable for searching and scanning short snippets. However, print has endured because it is still the superior technology for reading anything of length, quality or substance. While digital technology lends itself to discovering and remixing ideas in novel ways, slow reading of books is still essential for nurturing literacy and the capacity for extended linear thought.”

I couldn’t agree more. The two media have different functions and we begin to run into problems if this is not recognised and if they are seen as completely interchangeable. Engaging with an extended text in detail is something I always want to do in print, but I realise that for others this might not be the same. My concern, however, is particularly within education, where the drive towards embracing all things digital can happen at the expense of more fundamental literacy skills. Children need the skills both of quick scanning in order to manage the volumes of information available online and the ability to slow down and read in depth. Miedema says of print’s enduring prominence in a digital age: 

“Our casual information needs are served very well by the web, but our reading requirements run deeper than that. Sometimes we must slow down and read at a reflective pace and print facilitates that. Print and slowness have a close relationship. Print is fixed; the ideas will not change during a reading. A book is linear and long, encouraging the reader to recreate the author’s original sequence of thought. Print persists because it is a superior technology for integrating information of any length, complexity or richness; it is better suited to slow reading.”

I often find that this understanding of the different purposes of reading is what separates a successful student from an unsuccessful one; the casual skills used during skimming of information on the internet are not sufficient for academic success. It is for this reason I strongly believe that print and digital reading need to go hand-in-hand in order to teach these different reading skills. Digital and print reading need to be seen, not as mutually interchangeable, but as necessary, complementary elements of our thinking process.

So far I've enjoyed dipping into this little book for valuable insights about a subject I'm very interested in, so I'm hoping to have a bit more time to explore some of these ideas here. A friend of mine recently also pointed me in the direction of Maria Konnikova's New Yorker article Being a better online reader which underlines many of Miedema's points that I've discussed here. So to end off, I'd like to leave you with the following thoughts from the article:

"The shift from print to digital reading may lead to more than changes in speed and physical processing. It may come at a cost to understanding, analysing, and evaluating a text. Much of Mangen's (a professor at the National Centre for Reading Education and Research at the University of Stavanger, Norway) research focuses on how the format of reading material may affect not just eye movement or reading strategy by broader processing abilities. One of her main hypotheses is that the physical presence of a book - its heft, its feel, the weight and order of its pages - may have more than a purely emotional or nostalgic significance. People prefer physical books, not out of old-fashioned attachment but because the nature of the object iself has deeper repercussions for reading and comprehension. 'Anecdotally, I've heard some say it's like they haven't read anything properly if they've read it on a Kindle. The reading has left more of an ephemeral experience,' she told me. Her hunch is that the physicality of a printed page may matter for those reading experiences when you need a firmer grounding in the material. The text you read on a Kindle or computer simply doesn't have the same tangibility."

Read the full article here.

Information, knowledge and the role of reading

These days life seems to be spinning faster and faster, with the dizzying kind of momentum of a funfair ride; and I don't just mean in my personal life, but in a general sense too. Everyday, we are assailed by information and, to cope, our reading has adapted accordingly. We skim, we scan, picking at bits of information here and there. We skim lightly over the surface of words and facts and issues, all the time our eyes are speeding along looking for the next topic, the next link. We flit from text to text, gathering up information, but never completely diving in and immersing ourselves in just one text. We bookmark some for later, but "later" is never a place we actually reach.

Noticing this in myself and in others around me, has got me thinking about information as opposed to knowledge. Knowledge comes from a place of quietness, a pause in the rush of information. It demands a more total immersion in a text, many solitary moments free from distractions and, perhaps most costly, time. It means contemplation as opposed to gathering and for this reason is harder to quantify. Knowledge and information cannot, therefore, be the same and yet we often mistake the two.

I do firmly believe that knowledge is something that comes from slow reading. There is no shortcut, no special reading app, no electronic device that can speed up the process for us. Not truly. And so, in a fast world, slow reading remains our only real avenue to knowledge.

10 minutes

What do you do if you have ten minutes in your day to spare? (No, not the kind of ten minutes where you take food out the freezer or unpack the dishwasher or write a to-do list or sweep up something weird that your dog chewed on the lounge floor). Ten minutes of breathing space. Ten minutes of reading time. Do you scroll through your twitter feed? Browse links to favourite websites or blogs? Go to your facebook page? Or do you pick up a book that you're busy reading at the moment?

Recently I have been thinking a lot about reading in the internet age; about how it changes our reading habits subtly; fragments narratives, breaks reading down into bite-sized chunks. I've written about my concerns with reading and the internet here and here, but have only recently really noticed how it has changed my own habits as well. Where before I'd crack open the spine of a book to my bookmark, I'd more likely check my twitter feed and follow links to interesting articles online.

It happened without me really noticing it. Ten minutes just didn't seem long enough to warrant the effort of getting back into a story, ten minutes too much strain to pick up a narrative and let yourself be immersed in it again, even just for a moment. The longer I left it, the weaker the pull of the story, the more distant the characters became, hazy and fading like strangers. Ten minutes just seemed better suited for shorter things, for twitter, Instagram, quick bites of news... fast food reading.

And that is not a good diet! So I'm taking back those ten minutes for real reading: give me a book, my place marked in it, a cup of tea and just enough time to read a few more pages!

The end of reading? Part 2

To begin my second post on Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows (read Part 1 here), I would like to return to E.B. White's essay on the future of reading, to a particular section where he acknowledges reading as a solitary interaction between reader and writer. He points out, "Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy. As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading - the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the respondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequaled by any other form of communication."

In The Shallows, Carr looks at how reading online changes the act of reading and that this has made an impact on us. Reading online requires a different set of skills and has an altogether different character from the one described by E.B.White above. Reading therefore moves away from linear text towards shared, interactive reading rather than "deep" reading as a personal, solitary activity.

More specifically, what Carr writes about next is something I find particularly fascinating: how changes in reading style bring about changes in writing style. On the whole, the style of the internet tends towards the informal and accessible over the literary. Because information on the net is constantly updated and refreshed, writing becomes impermanent and can undergo countless revisions. Carr suggests that the pressure to achieve perfection will diminish as a result, "Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence."

The diminishing of reading as a practice of deep, solitary engagement with text raises some interesting questions: Will reading like this (or as E.B. White calls it in his essay: the Last Reader) become part of a small, elite group, a kind of "reading class"? Will reading be seen as holding a rare form of cultural capital or will it be seen as indulging in an arcane hobby? This might seem absurd, however this becomes less so when one considers how often people say they don't have time to read a book - the internet satisfies the need to read instantly and in bite-sized, manageable chunks that can be squeezed in between other activities.

Of course, it should be acknowledged that the world around us is constantly in flux and this ever-changing context requires new skills, which result in the loss of old ones. So, should we then mourn the loss of the literary mind or should we move with the intellectual and social trends that parallel the fast-moving, kaleidoscopic diversions that characterise modern life? Life really does seem too busy for solitary, extended reading (just ask a student) and Carr states, "In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us. We have cast our lot with the juggler."

So what does it mean to "cast our lot with the juggler"? What is the "juggler's brain" as Carr calls it? He returns to the notion that the internet changes our brains and points out that what we're not doing also has neurological consequences. He writes,

"Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that don't fire together don't wire together. As the time we spend scanning Web pages crowds out the time we spend reading books, as the time we spend exchanging bite-sized text messages crowds out the time we spend composing sentences and paragraphs, as the time we spend hopping across links crowds out the time we devote to quiet reflection and contemplation, the circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart.The brain recycles the disused neurons and synapses for other, more pressing work. We gain new skills and perspectives but lose old ones."

This becomes a problem when we consider how memory works. Carr goes into the differences between long term and working memory and how information is processed by our working memory which allows it to be stored in our long term memory. Our long term memory is virtually infinite, but our working memory has a limited capacity, so the more information it is bombarded with the less likely it is that this information will proceed to long term memory.

In opposition to the mass of information and distractions we face on the internet, reading a book provides a "steady drip" of information that can then be transferred to long term memory. As already expressed, information on the internet is the opposite: it is a flush of information, too much to adequately process, so only a small drop of this is transferred to long term memory. The internet often offers us a jumbled instead of a continuous, coherent stream of information from one source. Carr explains the impact of this, "The information flowing into our working memory at any given moment is called our 'cognitive load'. When the load exceeds our mind's ability to store and process the information - when the water overflows the thimble - we're unable to retain the information or to draw connections with the information already stored in our long-term memory. We can't translate the new information into schemas. Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains shallow."

This is the crux of Carr's argument: that the way we read information on the internet leads to shallow understanding and that we lose the ability to engage deeply and extensively with information. A loss or a necessary adaptation? I guess it remains to be seen, but I definitely think that rushing headlong into the internet without looking back is something we might regret.

The end of reading? Part 1

The other day I picked up E.B. White's collection of essays The second tree from the corner and read his essay entitled The future of reading which he penned in 1951. He states, "In schools and colleges, in these audio-visual days, doubt has been raised as to the future of reading - whether the printed word is on its last legs." He then puts forward the idea of the Last Reader, someone who continues reading in spite of the competition from new media. E.B. White wonders whether this Last Reader will become for society what the queen bee is to a hive, however comes to the conclusion that, "it is more likely that our modern hive of bees... will try to perpetuate the race through audio-visual devices, which ask no discipline of the mind and which are already giving the room the languor of an opium parlour."

Some time after that, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr found its way into my hands and piqued my interest because it not only proved to be strangely prophetic in terms of E.B.White's predictions about the place of reading in the modern world, but also because it confirmed an uneasy, niggling feeling I've had about our enthusiastic and (sometimes) reckless embrace of all things online.

Carr makes a compelling argument for how our brains change physiologically with use and that the internet is changing the way we read, think and remember and that this change is one that takes us from the depth of solitary reading to the shallows of distraction offered to us by the internet. Alarmist argument or fair warning? While I may write a blog, own a tablet and spend a fair amount of time online, I tend towards recognising this book as a fair warning. Reading is an issue that is close to my heart and I believe books to be fundamental in shaping our thinking and as a result, Carr's argument had my undivided attention from beginning to end. For this reason, I also felt that it deserved some space on this blog. I've divided my response to this book into two parts, firstly, the book as medium and secondly, the effects changes in reading habits have on us.

Carr begins by arguing that reading a page is different from reading a screen in that it lacks a certain tactile element to it. He writes, "The shift from paper to screen doesn't just change the way we navigate a piece of writing. It also influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it." One of the distinguishing features is that online reading makes use of hyperlinks. These hyperlinks don't just direct the reader to related works, but also offer a distraction from the main text, directing our attention away from it. Anyone who has suddenly found a whole evening gone as a result of the exploratory clicking of hyperlinks and the subsequent journey through the internet's rabbit-warren of interconnected texts will understand this.

The way that information is presented on the net is designed towards fragmentation rather than the engagement with the whole. Carr states, "A search engine often draws our attention to a particular snippet of text, a few words or sentences that have strong relevance to whatever we're searching for at the moment, while providing little incentive for taking in the work as a whole. We don't see the forest when we search the Web. We don't even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves." As a result, we don't engage with information in the same way we do with a book which follows a strongly linear fashion. Information on the net is synthesised, summarised, shortened, snipped, presented in graphics and generally made into more easily digestible, bite-sized bits. This, Carr argues, is having a profound impact on the way we think.

The Shallows is more than just a book about competing media (the printed word vs. online texts); it makes the argument that as we use technologies, these technologies actually change us. As a result, Carr remains firm that eBooks and printed books are not the same thing at all. Introducing connectivity and hyperlinks to eBooks fundamentally changes the book as a medium and how we experience it. The experience is ultimately diluted by a process of fragmentation. He quotes author, Stephen Johnson, to explain how this affects us as readers, "I fear that one of the great joys of book reading - the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas - will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there."

Since the rise of E.B. White's "audio-visual days" in the 50s and 60s, the internet has come along and surpassed these technologies, but his questions about the future of reading remain as relevant as ever. Are we now in the days of the Last Reader? Of course, the usefulness of the internet can't be denied; it is a tool that we can can use as we like and can even be viewed as an accessory to reading and writing. However, as tempting as it may seem, reading a printed book just can't be replaced.

Part 2 to follow soon!