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E-text: A threat to concentration?
January 11, 2009 | 2:48 pm
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By David Rothman
“The Kindle will only serve to worsen that concentration deficit, for when you use a Kindle, you are not merely a reader—you are also a consumer. Indeed, everything about the device is intended to keep you in a posture of consumption. As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has admitted, the Kindle ‘isn’t a device, it’s a service.’” – People of the Screen, in The New Atlantis.
The TeleRead take: That’s just a little snippet from Christine Rosen’s e-hostile essay, and I’d suggest you read the whole piece for some context. But I will say that if you want to focus on a Kindle book, you can. It’s not as if you must be constantly in browse mode or shop mode.
I do think she makes some good points. In Detroit, the Web is reportedly the main source of text for low-income students. Is this the best way for them to develop a capacity for sustained thought? How about the joys of recreational book-reading—in E or P—which actually can improve performance at work and school? I suspect the student are flitting from Web page to Web page rather than spending that much time on books in any medium. What’s more, could interactive digital media encourage us to become too “other directed” as opposed to learning to absorb books in solitude, without peers to influence our thoughts constantly?
Those are essential questions for policymakers in the U.S. and elsewhere to ponder when they talk about an expansion of broadband, which, beyond encouraging interactivity through “always on,” might encourage some Americans to be even more video-oriented than today.
But then Chistine Rosen is on thin ice when she laments that the Kindle does not “bear the impressions of previous readers, the smudges and folds and scribbles and forgotten treasures tucked amid the pages—markings of the man-made artifact.” So what? Far better to have the ability to annotate the books yourself than just to see “the smudges and folds.” I love paper books, too. I’ guess I’m just not into fold fetishes. I’d also warn her that the nature of e-text-related technology keeps changing, and that in the future it could be more paperlike than ever, if you wanted—complete with flippable pages that could display a number of different books, depending on what you called up. Who knows, maybe the pages will even be able to retain smudges and fold just like p-book.
(Via Conversational Reading.)
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Comments:
This is why I like a dedicated reader (in my case, Sony). Reading on a computer, phone, etc., I find myself constantly checking e-mail, reading texts and succumbing to other distractions. So I think she makes some good points.
So far, the only “distraction” for me on the Kindle is the dictionary. I am constantly looking up words for which I am not sure of the definition, and it does take the Kindle several seconds to respond. Ultimately, it’s better than just guessing at the definition, which is what I used to do most often when a dictionary was not within reach.
To use the Kindle as a web browser is an exercise in patience, too much trouble to bother with.
pidgeon92, is it better to look up words that you aren’t sure of? I don’t know, but it seems possible that trying to figure out a word in context (especially if you think you know it) may result in better recall than looking up the word and moving on.
Just a thought…
I’m with J Sweet — one of the reasons I bought a Sony rather than the Kindle is that the Kindle is too much like my laptop and the ability to browse online too distracting. OTOH, my Sony 505 emulates the pbook reading experience fairly well — not perfect, just close.
Over the years I have purchased several e-ink devices and what one I use is usually dictated by the lowest price or availability of the book I want to buy. Lately it has been books bought for on my Kindle. I have never once found myself wanting to browse or shop when reading a novel. Usually when I read it is because that is what I am in the mood to do at the time, so I really don’t have an urge to do anything else.
Besides. One could easily be distracted while reading a paperback book be and tempted to browse or shop on their smartphone.
I’m with LC. Once I start reading on the Kindle, I read it just like a p-book. You even swiftly get used to that annoying blinking thing the Kindle does when it turns pages. I don’t think my concentration level is any more or less than with p-book.
One thing that does happen, though, is that my tolerance level for bad writing (in fiction) or uninteresting writing (in nonfiction) goes way down. With a p-book you have to put the book down, go over to your book shelf, find a new book, etc. With the Kindle, you just hit one button and there are all your other reading options right in front of you. Life is too short to read bad books, though, so I’m not sure I’d class this as a defect.
This is once a though experiment putting perfect world scenarios for book consumption up against worst world scenario’s for web, it’s just one posible wiev it’s dont acutally tells the full story about the actual reality..
what about reading on the morning bus over maybe a month does that consist of prolonged concentration and is the web always read with the famous nielsen stat of 7 second to next click or can reality be different for a screen native generation.
And what about the way you read the manual for something, do you even know anyone who have read even the 10page manual for the microwave in one sitting session? a lot of web content just isn’t made up of long texts suitable deep reading, do we have any studies done on modern hw, that proves any reality to those myth(most of the figures trown arounds comes from a 80ies study done with microfilm or teletext for television displays).