http://www.ereads.com/2009/10/is-that-vook-youre-screading-or-are-you.html

re

”Coming up with a new word for what appears to be an exisiting practice will always seem redundant to most people. But at this juncture anything that reminds us that there IS a change going on here, rather than allowing us to forget that our artifacts always have implications on our behviour and our thoughts, should be considered useful. Will we always distinguish between reading and screening? I doubt it. But for now it is the discussion itself that’s crucial.”

Db

How tactility affects reading practices might be one of the most important questions of the next few decades as decorporealised information becomes the norm around the world. With projects like One Laptop Per Child (http://bit.ly/a2kB), and with the current pace of technological change, we will be seeing many countries, and many generations, only reading digitally. That this will have some kind of effect is undoubtable (the ubiquity of the codex form has had profound impacts upon philosophy, the structuring of information, belief systems, use of language etc. Why would a new, possibly more pervasive, form be any different?), but without debates such as those discussed above we may well ignore the potential ramifications, good or bad.

My own contribution: http://bit.ly/1GnCyG

_m

“……….. The new “reading environment” will emerge. And – surprise, surprise, it will share some of the same aspects of reading from ink on paper and in some ways it will diverge.

Screen technology is the key. And that’s big company stuff, big investment, highly technical.
All we can do is wait.

But in the meantime, LCD technology will be with us for many years. And we just have to milk that for all it’s worth.”

Ben, good points and I agree with much of what you said.

I should add that another word I have heard is the word “diging” (for digital reading) and pronounced as [dih-jing], nominated by New York Times reporter Richard Perez-Pena, who just might write about all this one day in the PRINT edition of his someday-to-be all-electronic newspaper.

My brief here is this: we do NOT need a new word. As in NEED. But I feel a new word or term, whatever it might turn out to be, and who knows, Google and Xerox and Kleenex became words out of the blue, and even Kindling is used as a verb now for readers who read on Kindles, they say “I am kindling now, will call you back later” and things like that, really, google the term.

My brief is that a new word MIGHT BE USEFUL in terms of helping scholars and scientists STUDY the differences between reading on paper and reading on screens, in terms of processing the info, analysing it, retention, critical thimking skills etc…. Scientists in Boston and LA are right now doing MRI scan studies on this very issue, and we will soon learn if indeed — as my hunch goes — different parts of the brain light up when reading on paper compared to when reading on a screen, and the parts that light up when paper reading are VASTLY SUPERIOR and MORE IMPORTANT to human civilization that the parts that light up with screen-reading. I might be wrong.

I might be right. We need to discuss this more and most of all, STUDY it with MRI scans.

I’m almost always against creating new dumb sounding words that are a portmanteau of two other words.

As far as the attention one gives to the content of the written word, we already have words for this: “reading” and “skimming”. Of course, after the first few sentences, I switched to skimming this article.

A distinction of screen reading is a delivery format that differs from street signs, printed paper or movie captions. The delivery is transient as the screen is quickly redrawn and re-access is compromised by changing and expanding search results and keyboard error. Screen navigation is also devoid of place or time ques or kinetic manipulations that assist orientation in larger works. The screen reader is also separated from content by encoding, software and electrical and radio transmission. The reading is highly mediated.

So the needed descriptor has actually been realized when the format is used as an adjective; screen reading, print reading, recital or recitation reading, palm reading and so on.