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stated that 'long-form reading is losing ground to short-form reading
. . . we change our tools and our tools change us' (Feldman, 2009).
Power browsing is the norm for the internet's 'promiscuous users', who
want instant online access, preferably for free.
Rosen (2008) worries that 'collaborative “information foraging” will
replace solitary deep reading; the connected screen will replace the
disconnected book . . . Literacy, the most empowering achievement of
our civilization, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy.
The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in
favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.'
But then, in 1477 the Venetian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico
worried that an abundance of books would lead to intellectual laziness,
making men 'less studious'.
Plus ça change
.
Noted science fiction author and physics professor Gregory Benford
(2009) reflects that 'people read like crazy on the Internet - but they
are not reading 60,000 narratively coherent words in a row … they live
within a flow of mediated micro particles'. Carr (2008) believes that he
can no longer connect with long articles or books the way he used to:
'And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for
concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in
information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream
of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip
along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.'
Rosen (2008) quotes the noted critic George Steiner from a 1988
Times
Literary Supplement
article: 'I would not be surprised if that which lies
ahead for classical modes of reading resembles the monasticism from
which those modes sprung. I sometimes dream of
houses of reading
- a
Hebrew phrase - in which those passionate to learn to read well would
find the necessary guidance, silence and complicity of disciplined
companionship.' Words reflected by Terry Pratchett, the English author,
when I interviewed him in 2007. He decried the transformation of the
English public library into a noisy internet café-cum-mall, favouring a
return to quiet places in public libraries. Maybe the wheel will turn and
libraries will provide monastic e-cubicles of silence amid the noise of the
information commons and the decline in public space etiquette.
Similar trends in changes in reading patterns and attention spans
have been reflected in analyses of usage of the scientific literature. The
time available to scientists to read articles has declined almost in