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“Screening”, “Screeding,” or “Reading”: which do you like?
October 18, 2009 | 10:13 am
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By a TeleRead Contributor
Editor’s Note: Danny Bloom is a freelance writer based in Taiwan. He blogs about “screening” issues and welcomes all comments pro and con. Paul Biba
TAIPEI, TAIWAN — Are you reading this commentary — or — are you screening this? Or screading it, even? How you answer the question will determine whether you get to the bottom of this.
Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe on June 19, fired the first volley in this now-national discussion.
“Do we read differently on the computer screen from how we read on the printed page?” Beam asked rhetorically. His column was headlined by a savvy Globe copyeditor: “I screen, you screen, we all screen.”
The answer to Beam’s question is, of course, yes! From most of the research that has come in so far from academics in North America and Europe, the answer is clear, although not everyone’s in agreement with what it all means.
Perhaps some future MRI brain scan studies will show us how different parts of the brain light up when we read on paper compared to when we read on a computer screen or a Kindle? I think scientists will crack this soon.
Yes, “screening” already has multiple meanings, so can we really call screen-reading “screening”? For example, we screen movies, we screen job candidates, we screen patients for medical problems, we do a lot of “screening” in this world of ours.
As for “reading,” we read books, we read maps, we read minds, we read palms, we read the clouds, we read lots of things.
When I asked Dr. Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger in Norway what she thought about perhaps using the word screening” for reading on a screen, she told me in an email: “My first impression is that the term ‘screening’ is adequate in some respects, but not in others. It’s adequate to the extent that it points to certain differences in the reading mode which has to do with the display nature, the central bias of a screen compared to a page of print text (our gaze is naturally oriented towards the center), and the image-like character of modalities (we tend to read a screen spatially, in contrast to the page which we linearly).”
Dr Mangen, in an important academic paper published in Britain last December of 2008, listed a few reasons that reading on paper and reading on a screen are two very different animals.
* Reading on a screen is not as rewarding — or effective — as reading printed words on paper.
* The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical manipulation of the computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and appreciate what we’re reading.
* Online text moves up and down the screen and lacks physical dimension, robbing us of a feeling of completeness.
* The visual happenings on a compter screen and our physical interaction with the entire device and its set ip can be distracting. All of these things tax human cognition and concentration in a way that a book or newspaper or magazine does not.
* The experience of reading a book or a newspaper or a magazine is both a story experience and a tactile one.
The jury’s still out on just how different reading on paper is from reading on a screen, but the public discussions in the blogsphere are getting interesting — and heated. But more and more, top experts in the computer and Internet fields, as well as typeface designers and readability gurus, are in agreement that we need a new word for reading on screens, and that the word should be “screening.” For now. A completely new word might come down the information highway in the future and take the place of screening. But for now, you screen, I screen, we all screen.
We asked Kevin Kelly, the well-respected maverick of Wired magazine, what he felt about this new word for reading on screens, he told us by email in one short sentence: “I would be happy to see screening become a verb (for this).”
Mim Harrison, a book editor in Florida with Levenger Press, said: “I find the distinction between reading and screening to be intriguing, and it certainly gives us all pause to consider just what it is we’re doing with our eyeballs these days.”
“Screening, of course, is not a new term,” a top expert in predicting the future told us in a recent email, but this might just be the time that it catches on in the way you suggest. Screening is a clever and useful term capturing the fact that the experience of reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading on paper. Not a priori worse or better; just different.”
And then he added this important note: “It is the right word for the moment in terms of drawing people’s attention to the vast literary shift about to wash over us.”
When we asked technology reporter John Markoff at the New York Times about this idea, he replied in a one-word email note: “Hmmmmmmm.”
We asked David Pogue at the New York Times the same question, and he said: “Very interesting.”
We asked another top specialist in the field, a former MacArthur genius award winner, what he felt about a new word for reading on screens, and he said: “I rather like ‘screading’.”
So, dear Reader, er, Screener, er, Screader, what is your point of view on all this? Do we need a new word for reading on a screen, and what might that word be? Any more suggestions? Dish!
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Comments:
Reading applies to interpretation of gesture, weather, music, pictorial, video, wines, and a great variety of kinetic and sensory experience. Nothing wrong with the generic meaning or its wide application. In my view, the useful topic here is taxonomy of distinctive kinds of reading. And, perhaps, different kinds of reading are interdependent and tend to augment each other. The careful and expressive textual descriptions of the experience of wines or cheeses comes to mind.
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.
It doesn’t make any difference to me if the text is on a computer screen or piece of paper, and I don’t feel that I read any differently on a computer screen than a piece of paper–except paper doesn’t blink and flash ads in your face.
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.
Gary Frost, very good comment! Yes yes yes. What you said is very important in this discussion. Do you have a blog or a website. You must be a professor somewhere, right? Where? (Emailme please offline at danbloom AT gmail DOT com
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.
Guest comment, froma friend, who writes:
“……….. 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.”
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.
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
Reading is reading. Trying to find a new word to describe reading on a screen, whether a computer screen or ereader screen, will just further alienate people who are against ebooks on the basis that print is 100X better.
Matt and Brad, good points all, I am reading everything. Thanks for feedback, pro and con. You are learning me.
Db
Matt,you hit the nail on the head here. You read my mind. You verbalized what I could not verbalize quite the same way. Thanks!
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.”
Is That a Vook You’re Screading or Are You Just Kindling? google this title headline to see Richard Curtis’s very good blog post on this topic.
http://www.ereads.com/2009/10/is-that-vook-youre-screading-or-are-you.html