awesome pic. Also, seldom has an article considered a dumber question. Just how difficult is it to know what reading is? - j1m via Bookmarklet
What's that weird stuff those people are holding? Some sort of tree mulch? - Jim Norris
Ack, the more I read the stupider it gets. "What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text." Until youtube became popular kids who were online were spending *100% of the online time reading and writing*. *There's really not much else to do*. What do these people think is the valuable part of reading a book, the mildew smell? - j1m
"sending instant messages, [an] activity that involve minimal reading at best." Did the author actually get a lobotomy before writing the article? - j1m
@j1m, isn't the fact that you shared this before reading the whole article, then commented more later on after reading more, a perfect example of the differences explored in this piece? I thought it was pretty interesting, and can see a difference between reading online (perusing the first paragraph of 20 things i find in friend feed) and reading a chapter in a paperback where I have nowhere else to jump to. I don't think reading online is worse, but it does seem different. - Karl Rosaen
Yeah, the differences in order/interactivity/linearity/duration between online and offline reading are very real, maybe even for the reasons the author suggests, though s/he certainly fails to make a convincing case. The core problem with this article, though, is that it believes the bullshit of it's title. Reading is understanding language by looking at a text representation of it. That doesn't suddenly change when you put a dead tree behind the text, and it's embarrassing to see such weak thinking in a publication like The Times - j1m
Yeah, I may have been filling in the gaps a bit in my head while reading it; it's not very coherent. - Karl Rosaen
You do raise an interesting point. How is what we learn different/more/less if we browse a lot of first paragraphs than if we read a long article? My first guess we're making a decent attempt at optimal information foraging, and that after 20 minutes online we've learned more than we would have by reading a single long article, which, after all, we just do because print forces you to choose from among the non-ideal articles you have with you. - j1m
Is it terrible that I could not finish this article? I'm not kidding. And I don't even mean the online version. I had the hardcopy newspaper version of this article, and I still couldn't finish it. It was just boring. - Ana
