Reading behavior in the digital environment, by Ziming Liu. Review and Musings/J. Colannino

How has reading behavior changed with the advent of electronic documents? To find out, Dr Ziming Liu used a convenient sample comprising 250 surveys distributed to “engineers, scientists, accountants, teachers… managers… and graduate students at San Jose State University,” of which 119 were returned (six of them incomplete). In his study, he reports that online text is harder to comprehend and slower to read. The medium affects the message.

Perhaps changes are inevitable with the introduction of any new technology. When the masses began learning to read and write, philosophers such as Plato complained that we would lose our memories. I personally witnessed university professors warning of mental decline and that slide rules were better at preserving mathematical acumen. (Perhaps great mathematicians voiced a similar refrain with the advent of the slide rule; I am old enough to have used one, but not old enough to have witnessed its introduction!) The widespread influence of television prompted Marshall McLuhan to note that “the message is the medium,” meaning that television’s necessarily iconic representations changed not only how information was presented, but what was presented. Indeed, most of these prognostications have come to pass to greater or lesser extent, but on balance, society has benefited not lost. Apparently, this trend continues with electronic documents.

Most of us can bear personal witness to Liu’s conclusions, agreeing that electronic documents result in

• Less time spent on in-depth reading
• Less time annotating text
• Shallower, more fragmented and less concentrated reading
• Less intensive reading, and
• The printing of documents

With respect to this last point, Liu says “It seems unlikely that the computer will in the future replace the printed book as a reading medium in the way that it replaced the typewriter as a writing tool.” On the other hand, electronic documents have some amazing advantages, including

• The timely availability of information
• Hyperlink options
• Imbedded multimedia such as audio and video clips

Indeed, it is these features which (quoting Levy) lead “toward shallower, more fragmented, and less concentrated reading,” as users jump from the text to who knows where via hyperlink.

My Experience
I am a quinquagenarian who does plenty of traditional reading – especially of books. I highlight and annotate them copiously. I rarely reread books; the simple act of highlighting and annotating serves to etch the big picture and seminal facts in my mind. But what if I am trying to provide a formal reference for an important fact? In that case, my memory tells me which book to select and where on which page to look. If it is a fact I remember, I probably highlighted it on my initial reading, so the highlighting doubles as a finding aid. This accords with Liu’s summary of Olsen’s work: “Readers tend to establish a visual memory for the location of items on a page and within a document.”

Being over forty and a lover of books is supposed to be a recipe for shunning e-text; at one time this was true; but now in most ways, I prefer e-text. True, with e-documents, there is no side of the page or physicality to help in locating facts. However, I can search for the exact phrase and find it instantly, so this is not much of a handicap. Indeed, there are many advantages. For one, hyperlinked references are much more convenient than traditional print references. (How I wish footnoted references on physical pages were hyperlinked!) While I can (and sometimes do) misplace books, I can always find an electronic document on my computer, invoking the search engine if necessary.

Before I began graduate studies only a year ago, I was reluctant to read text on screen. However, I now read all e-text onscreen. Since most of our reading assignments are scholarly works of ten to fifteen pages each, I would say that I have now mastered the art of reading and writing electronically.

Old Dog Learns New Tricks
I am an old dog who has learned new tricks. I do everything I used to do with print materials and more; I highlight (usually in three different colors – yellow for important points, green for really important points, and pink for definitions), and I annotate. I do this with two main programs – Adobe Acrobat Writer and Word. I am aware of no e-text which cannot be converted to one of these formats.

If I can do it, anyone can do it. So maybe we should think of e-text and books as microwave and conventional ovens, respectively. Some things are less satisfying in the microwave, but we have learned the advantages of each and in so doing, we have learned how to live with both.

The public library as a meeting-place in a multicultural and digital context... by Ragnar Audunson/ Review and Critique -- J. Colannino

I had not been acquainted with Dr. Audunson until now. According to his biography, he is a political scientist in the Library and Information Science Department at Oslo University College, Norway. The subject writing concerns the political and social roles of the library in democracy and proposes that libraries serve as an important meeting place for patrons to share and exchange culture.

Synopsis
Dr. Audunson asserts that democratic institutions require tolerance and diversity to function, or as he puts it “The cement of democracy is tolerance.” Accordingly, society must create “arenas where people belonging to different cultural groups can meet and communicate,” and these arenas should be low-intensive places. I did not find the concept well-defined in the text, except perhaps by contrast to high-intensive places, where: “You can communicate intensively with persons sharing your interests and values… and you don’t have to bother with those disturbing persons holding opposite values and views.” With such a definition, low-intensive places are mono-cultural ones and high-intensive places are multicultural ones, though perhaps the intensity of debate among seminal issues is meant to be the distinguishing feature. The author uses “place” both literally and metonymically (for example, the church choir is a low-intensive “place”). In his view, the library is the best low-intensive place to share rival philosophies, and “For the future of democracy this is a question of utmost importance.”

Finally, Audunson appears to endorse the opinion that “No teacher or librarian should try to tell people how they should live their lives…. the role of the library is to promote self-realisation… not to make judgments and selections.”

My View
So what do I think? I find Audunson’s arguments unconvincing. First of all, the construct that libraries should not behave normatively is self-destructive – it is a normative pronouncement that no normative pronouncements should be made. Yet his text is full of normative statements, things that libraries should and should not do, ways that democracies should and should not behave, actions that people should and should not take, how societies should and should not function. If librarians should not “tell people how to live their lives,” why should I listen to Audunson?

Second, Audunson does not support his pronouncements with data, and his assertions are easily disproved: we share ideas in many places, not merely low-intensive ones. Here are some counter-examples: political debates are high-intensive places where we are exposed to alien ideas. So are religious revival meetings. The university classroom can be a high-intensive place. And what of blogs and chatrooms?

It is even true that democracy can exist without diversity or tolerance; there is nothing in a pure democracy that even requires them. Even today, Japan is mono-cultural yet democratic. Singapore is politically intolerant, yet democratic. In the U.S., slavery was democratically enacted, maintained, and overturned. Democracy only means the majority supports an idea, whether good or bad. As such, democracy does not safeguard our freedoms, nor does diversity. Even tolerance can be oppressive if evil is its beneficiary. For these reasons, we need normative standards, the very kind Audunson seems to disapprove.

Finally, Audunson seems to hold to a (long-discredited) utopian concept of society where the mere provision of place creates harmony. If he were correct, Sunday would not be the most segregated day of the week, nor would the lunch room be the most segregated place on the high school campus.

The library is designed to collect information from authorities and disseminate it to patrons, but that is a one-way street. It is not well-suited as a marketplace of ideas among its congregants. How could a place that demands its patrons not speak to one another even be nominated for that function? Are libraries so unimportant in their own right that we need to feign that the fate of the free world is wrapped in their mantle? Must we invent new and nonsensical functions for them? Until libraries learn how to forcefully base their droit d'être (right to exist) on their raison d’etre they shall continue to decline in relevance.