Reading in a Whole New Way
As digital screens proliferate and people move from print to pixel, how will the act of reading change?
- By Kevin Kelly
- Smithsonian magazine, July-August 2010, Subscribe
America was founded on the written word. Its roots spring from documents—the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and, indirectly, the Bible. The country’s success depended on high levels of literacy, freedom of the press, allegiance to the rule of law (found in books) and a common language across a continent. American prosperity and liberty grew out of a culture of reading and writing.
But reading and writing, like all technologies, are dynamic. In ancient times, authors often dictated their books. Dictation sounded like an uninterrupted series of letters, so scribes wrote down the letters in one long continuous string, justastheyoccurinspeech. Text was written without spaces between words until the 11th century. This continuous script made books hard to read, so only a few people were accomplished at reading them aloud to others. Being able to read silently to yourself was considered an amazing talent. Writing was an even rarer skill. In 15th-century Europe only one in 20 adult males could write.
After Gutenberg’s printing press came along around 1440, mass-produced books changed the way people read and wrote. The technology of printing expanded the number of words available (from about 50,000 words in Old English to a million today). More word choices enlarged what could be communicated. More media choices broadened what was written about. Authors did not have to compose scholarly tomes but could “waste” inexpensive books on heart-rending love stories (the romance novel was invented in 1740), or publish memoirs even if they were not kings. People could write tracts to oppose the prevailing consensus, and with cheap printing those unorthodox ideas could gain enough influence to topple a king, or a pope. In time, the power of authors birthed the idea of authority and bred a culture of expertise. Perfection was achieved “by the book.” Laws were compiled into official tomes, contracts were written down and nothing was valid unless put into words. Painting, music, architecture, dance were all important, but the heartbeat of Western culture was the turning pages of a book. By 1910 three-quarters of the towns in America with more than 2,500 residents had a public library. We became a people of the book.
Today some 4.5 billion digital screens illuminate our lives. Words have migrated from wood pulp to pixels on computers, phones, laptops, game consoles, televisions, billboards and tablets. Letters are no longer fixed in black ink on paper, but flitter on a glass surface in a rainbow of colors as fast as our eyes can blink. Screens fill our pockets, briefcases, dashboards, living room walls and the sides of buildings. They sit in front of us when we work—regardless of what we do. We are now people of the screen. And of course, these newly ubiquitous screens have changed how we read and write.
The first screens that overtook culture, several decades ago—the big, fat, warm tubes of television—reduced the time we spent reading to such an extent that it seemed as if reading and writing were over. Educators, intellectuals, politicians and parents worried deeply that the TV generation would be unable to write. But the interconnected cool, thin displays of the second wave of screens launched an epidemic of writing that continues to swell. The amount of time people spend reading has almost tripled since 1980. By 2008 more than a trillion pages were added to the World Wide Web, and that total grows by several billion a day. Each of these pages was written by somebody. Right now ordinary citizens compose 1.5 million blog posts per day. Using their thumbs instead of pens, young people in college or at work around the world collectively write 12 billion quips per day from their phones. More screens continue to swell the volume of reading and writing.
But it is not book reading. Or newspaper reading. It is screen reading. Screens are always on, and, unlike with books we never stop staring at them. This new platform is very visual, and it is gradually merging words with moving images: words zip around, they float over images, serving as footnotes or annotations, linking to other words or images. You might think of this new medium as books we watch, or television we read. Screens are also intensely data-driven. Pixels encourage numeracy and produce rivers of numbers flowing into databases. Visualizing data is a new art, and reading charts a new literacy. Screen culture demands fluency in all kinds of symbols, not just letters.
And it demands more than our eyes. The most physically active we may get while reading a book is to flip the pages or dog-ear a corner. But screens engage our bodies. Touch screens respond to the ceaseless caress of our fingers. Sensors in game consoles such as the Nintendo Wii track our hands and arms. We interact with what we see. Soon enough, screens will follow our eyes to perceive where we gaze. A screen will know what we are paying attention to and for how long. In the futuristic movie Minority Report (2002), the character played by Tom Cruise stands in front of a wraparound screen and hunts through vast archives of information with the gestures of a symphony conductor. Reading becomes almost athletic. Just as it seemed weird five centuries ago to see someone read silently, in the future it will seem weird to read without moving your body.
Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. The screen rewards, and nurtures, thinking in real time. We review a movie while we watch it, we come up with an obscure fact in the middle of an argument, we read the owner’s manual of a gadget we spy in a store before we purchase it rather than after we get home and discover that it can’t do what we need it to do.
Screens provoke action instead of persuasion. Propaganda is less effective in a world of screens, because while misinformation travels fast, corrections do, too. On a screen it is often easier to correct a falsehood than to tell one in the first place; Wikipedia works so well because it removes an error in a single click. In books we find a revealed truth; on the screen we assemble our own truth from pieces. On networked screens everything is linked to everything else. The status of a new creation is determined not by the rating given to it by critics but by the degree to which it is linked to the rest of the world. A person, artifact or fact does not “exist” until it is linked.
A screen can reveal the inner nature of things. Waving the camera eye of a smartphone over the bar code of a manufactured product reveals its price, origins and even relevant comments by other owners. It is as if the screen displays the object’s intangible essence. A popular kid’s toy (Webkinz) instills stuffed animals with a virtual character that is “hidden” inside; a screen enables children to play with this inner character online in a virtual world.
As portable screens become more powerful, lighter and larger, they will be used to view more of this inner world. Hold an electronic tablet up as you walk along a street, and it will show an annotated overlay of the real street ahead—where the clean restrooms are, which stores sell your favorite items, where your friends are hanging out. Computer chips are becoming so small, and screens so thin and cheap, that in the next 40 years semitransparent eyeglasses will apply an informational layer to reality. If you pick up an object while peering through these spectacles, the object’s (or place’s) essential information will appear in overlay text. In this way screens will enable us to “read” everything, not just text. Last year alone, five quintillion (10 to the power of 18) transistors were embedded into objects other than computers. Very soon most manufactured items, from shoes to cans of soup, will contain a small sliver of dim intelligence, and screens will be the tool we use to interact with this transistorized information.
More important, our screens will also watch us. They will be our mirrors, the wells into which we look to find out about ourselves. Not to see our face, but our status. Already millions of people use pocketable screens to input their location, what they eat, how much they weigh, their mood, their sleep patterns and what they see. A few pioneers have begun lifelogging: recording every single detail, conversation, picture and activity. A screen both records and displays this database of activities. The result of this constant self-tracking is an impeccable “memory” of their lives and an unexpectedly objective and quantifiable view of themselves, one that no book can provide. The screen becomes part of our identity.
We live on screens of all sizes—from the IMAX to the iPhone. In the near future we will never be far from one. Screens will be the first place we’ll look for answers, for friends, for news, for meaning, for our sense of who we are and who we can be.
Kevin Kelly’s book What Technology Wants will be published in October.
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Comments (20)
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To Dan Bloom re "I've been in touch with Kevin Kelly on these reading issues, and I once asked him what he thought about calling the act of reading on a screen, or off a screen, as some say, as "screening" -- as a new word to differentiate this act from reading on paper, since the two reading modes are so different in terms of processing, retention and analysis."
I'm perplexed. Re "...the two reading modes are so different in terms of processing, retention and analysis." How so?
Whether I read something on paper or screen, I still deal with it mentally in the same way as far as I can discern. I have many choices open to me on what to think (or not to think) about what I've just read. I see no difference whatsoever. It still reaches the same neurons. Please elucidate.
Posted by Sharon Stevenson on August 27,2011 | 09:22 PM
I imagine a similar amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (what we call in the technology world, "the FUD factor") at all of the major inflection points of literary culture. Think of how dehumanizing a "manufactured" book must have seemed to the proponents of the illuminated book industry.
As for me, the simple fact that the Kindle is so portable, and doesn't get mixed in with my thousands of paper books, means that I read more on it. I read literary biography, history, and so on. And since the titles I tote around in my few ounces of device would weigh about 40 lbs. in print, the convenience leads to more reading as I wait in lines or otherwise have small spaces in the day.
It's easy to opine about the tragedy of reading on a screen, but my then 12-year-old stepson read 20 or more books by Jules Verne, as well as Huckelberry Finn, Moby-Dick, and McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom on a Kindle... Should I have stopped him?
I have a masters degree in poetry writing, taught literature, and have been a literary publisher for 20 years; for me, reading is reading, whether on a device or in a book.
Posted by Jordan Jones on June 3,2011 | 09:12 AM
As a parent to one of the kindergartners receiving an ipad next year in Auburn, Maine, I took this article very personally. I have shared it with all the people I know who are opposed or in favor of this boards decision to add these ipads to their teaching tools.
Posted by Sean Fitzpatrick on April 14,2011 | 12:02 PM
Dan Bloom: "I have coined the term ``frankenbooks" as a new word for e-books and e-readers.'
Dear Mr. Bloom, the term Frankenbooks has been in use for quite some time. I first heard the term used by a peer at my publishing company, 18 months ago. I suspect that he got it from somewhere else. Prior art rules.
Posted by Phil on October 30,2010 | 12:59 AM
"Where is the wisdom in information?" T.S. Eliot Your 40th anniversary issue really had me, as someone who plans to be around for the next 40 years, right up until the end.
Oh, there were little incongruencies that made me chuckle, like Joel Kotkin’s graphic on p. 65 pointing out that, in 2005, the average Afghani could expect to live to the ripe old age of 43 juxtaposed against Carolyn O’Hara on p. 74 bemoaning the unsettling “youth bulge” of 15-to-29-year-olds there. Isn’t 29 well advanced into middle age if the endpoint is 43?
Rosamund Naylor’s promotion of genetically modified yellow rice—white rice spliced with daffodil genes—gave me a chill. No one knows the long-term effects of human ingestion of GMOs, and daffodils are poisonous in all their parts. I’ll stick to brown rice, thank you. (Although that could be a GMO, too: since no labeling of modified products is required, consumers have no idea what’s in their food anymore. Go, Monsanto and DuPont!)
But Kevin Kelley’s paean to the Brave New Screen World depressed me profoundly, especially following Vinton Cerf’s circumspect concern about the demise of critical thinking engendered by the frightening reliance of Americans on the World Wide Web. Doesn’t the spider imagery of that term strike anyone else as ominous? Kelley’s enthusiastic portrayal of omnipresent screens as the new soma made me want to weep. I kept flashing on high-school psychology-class pictures of those sad little insane rhesus monkeys deprived of the living, breathing society of their own kind. Screens are not tactile, nor do they have any smell. No thanks, Mr. K. I think I’ll pass on having one implanted in my eye.
Maybe I’ll move to Afghanistan, where, statistically at least, I’ve been dead for 14 years.
Posted by Kathy Fitzgerald on August 17,2010 | 11:10 AM
My jaw dropped at the sentence "A person, artifact or fact does not “exist” until it is linked."
This nullifies the millions upon millions of people who do not have internet access, including my grandfather and at least a quarter of the United States alone. This is a dehumanizing statement.
Posted by Beth on August 12,2010 | 11:44 AM
"Less is more" doesn't translate as less information is more value. Instead, the efficient structuring of information, finds a co-relate in its efficient processing by the brain, and in this sense value is actualized.
The benefits of screening depend entirely on how GUI authors organize information. If they can extend the boundaries of a format (e.g WIRED and Popular Science Ipad edition) in order to provide a rich, challenging, personal experience, that'real value across the continuum of producer, interface, consumer.
If the GUI just provides for the same old "grazing" "more is more" glut of hyper-links, copy-paste, bits and parts of quicktime movies all gathering dust in the cache, then "screening" which has great potential just becomes yoked to our habits, a throw-back from the 90s, from the first days of the web.
I think the early adopters, children/teens and the late adopters(elderly re-discovering a beloved format, easily accessible content) will actually provide the impetus for challenging innovations in "screening".
Posted by zm on August 11,2010 | 03:11 PM
I guess all the readers here must be over 30, probably over 40. I certainly enjoy coffee table books or other books with beautiful illustrations or very large sizing. But for portability, text searchability, copy-and-pasting (sharing, organization), weightlessness, compactness, environmental sustainability, interactivity, hyperlinking, and frankly just plain ergonomic ease (I can display on my laptop vs. e-book reader vs. large-screen LCD depending on my reading position and mood), I would choose 'screening' over 'reading' anyday. I guess older people are used to reading text on dead trees- old habits die hard. Or maybe they have eyesight issues.
Posted by Brent on August 10,2010 | 02:46 AM
The underlying flow, a "greater or allegorical theme" of a written work cannot be gauged, nor the logic of its arguments fully understood by constant interruption based on partial knowledge.
Yes there is the space for commentary, but that too has its place. Imagine if the commentary itself was constantly fragmented and redacted, I don't think the would be reader-hacker-turned_commentator would appreciate finding himself in the same position as the author of the original work.
One can admit Benjamin's "translator" as having a unique place and contribution, however one can still do so without violating the spirit of the original work which resides within its structure, its corpus, and in doing so the whole idea of "authorship". Along with the idea of authorship comes an idea responsibility by the author, towards what is written.
"Editing on the fly" can have a negative impact on all these ideals, of which the book form is an adaptation. The book is the vessel, for human thought. Human thought is not a vessel for an evolutionary form of which the book as we know it, is an instance.
Personally I feel turning the brain into an aggregator site, by constantly processing partial information in a partial way i.e not allowing time or context across the entire linguistic stratum in which a particular "meme" is embedded, to temper ideas, is doing great disservice to THE adaptive evolutionary tool that makes us human.
Posted by zm on August 10,2010 | 10:40 PM
"America was founded on the written word..."
A rather delusional statement. I'm sure we would all like to think this, but it needn't take much reflection to realise that America was founded on blood, greed and slavery.
Posted by kaleem on August 6,2010 | 09:16 AM
'Frankenbooks': new term for e-books
Dear editor, [published in Korea Times today]
As someone who enjoys reading on paper, whether it be a newspaper or a magazine or a book, I have coined the term ``frankenbooks" as a new word for e-books and e-readers.
I am using the term with humor, but also in a serious manner, and also as part of what we might call a cautionary tale, since device readers and e-books are here to stay, like them or not. I just hope ``frankenbooks" do not replace paper books completely. If that happens, we've lost the game.
At the same time, I like reading the news on screens, and using our screen technology to post letters like this one. I am not an anti-Internet Luddite.
In fact, I like both paper and screens, and we need a balance.
Hopefully, the term ``frankenbooks" will make readers pause and think in which direction we are going. Toward the light, or toward the darkness, I'm still not sure.
Dan E. Bloom
Taiwan
Posted by Dan E. Bloom on July 26,2010 | 01:03 AM
We can agree or disagree with Kevin, but the world keeps spinning. Screens are made and used in instructive and destructive ways. As an educator I need to learn to use screens as learning platforms so that I can model constructive informative behavior for the students I interact with.
So here is how I came to write this post. I subscribe to Will Richardson's blog weblog-ed in my Google Reader. He shared a link to Kevin Kelly's blog Technium. As I read the blog post I used Diigo to underline and add sticky notes. I now have this annotation in my Diigo groups. I will Twitter this and add a link in the New Literacies Institute Ning at newlit.org. Kevin will sell a few more books, which I have hundreds of, and add more readers of his blog.
Posted by Jim Walker on July 18,2010 | 04:15 PM
I've been in touch with Kevin Kelly on these reading issues, and I once asked him what he thought about calling the act of reading on a screen, or off a screen, as some say, as "screening" -- as a new word to differentiate this act from reading on paper, since the two reading modes are so different in terms of processing, retention and analysis. He wrote back to me and said "I'd be happy to see 'screening' used in this way."
One thing his very good article does not mention is this: screening is vastly inferior, Kevin, to reading on paper, in terms of processing of text, retention of texy (memory and recall) and analysis (critical thinking skills), and future MRI scans will most likely prove my hunch, which nobody is talking about and which is the 800 pound gorilla in the room, that reading on paper is vastly superior for processing, retention and analysis, compared to screen-reading, but until the MRI testing begins and the academic papers on this are written and published, the media will go on blah blahing about "screening" as if it's a good thing. It is not a good thing. It is good for email reading and blog reading and quick reads online, for speed and convenience, but screening is not reading, and even Kevin Kelly agrees with me, although he does not come out here and say it. Nobody will agree with me publicly until the MRI scan results come out, and then we will know that reading on paper lights up different parts of the brain that are superior for processing, retention and analysis. Stay glued to your screens, everyone! There is more here than meets the eye!
Posted by Dan Bloom on July 17,2010 | 10:44 PM
This article is very interesting because it made me think.And I thougt that I was right when I bought a computer for my 81st birthday.It has a wide screen,and I could enlarge the letters to be able to read it because my eyes are bad.
I felt that I was not anymore excluded of the world.I had entered the 21st century.
The last 12 or some years I spend writing a book by hand.Nobody would ever read a single word of the more than 400 pages.No editor would have accepted it.But is has been typed and now it is on the web.Everybody can read it,and sites of military history,dutch and french,published it or parts of it(I wrote it in french)because it is about the 1940-campaign.
Thank you,dear author,you made me feel I was right.
Eric van den Bergh
Posted by Eric van den Bergh on July 15,2010 | 11:27 AM
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