The part of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains that I’m focusing on this time is about how our reading patterns have changed over time. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to feel better or not; studies indicate that we read much less in-depth than we used to. I guess I can feel less guilty about brain overload, but I also feel a little cheated. Prior to reading this, I just assumed I was a bad reader, even though I’m really not, but now I guess I can blame it on the internet and technology in general. I prefer reading online texts and “virtual” texts like my Kindle over paper copies because I feel the “print” is easier to read, i.e., easier to skim. I’m just a skimmer! Sometimes it’s necessary, sometimes we’re told to just to get the general gist, sometimes it’s better–but rarely.
Carr talks about how we read in an F pattern now; you read the first line, skim down a couple lines, read the whole line, skip down a few lines to make sure you’re not missing anything important, then skip to the next paragraph. I’d like to think I read a little more than two lines out of a paragraph, but I know that I look for absolutely essential words, and try to block out the more flowery words. I tried to see what pattern I was reading this text in, and an F-shape seems pretty close.
What he said struck me as interesting because in Dr. Levy’s composition class, we spent about half an hour one day last week reading only the titles and first lines of short stories submitted to The New Yorker. We voted on whether we would keep reading or not; I was about half-and-half for all of the titles, but it was interesting how some people (cough Sam cough) wouldn’t read anything and others would read everything. So, in one class, we’re told to focus on creating interesting titles and beginning sentences to draw readers in, and this book says that, for readers, that seems to be the natural way to read. And why should we read something we know we’re not going to be interested in?
hjstone 