Hayles Response
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 I think answering questions about what reading means before the internet and now has to be contextualized within what your objective is. Is this reading for pleasure, or reading as part of coursework for secondary education, undergrad, or grad school? Hayles identified a decreased efficacy in all of these categories. Is the goal then to come up with a sort of synthesis of different reading techniques that can be used across different mediums we encounter text?
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Hayles discusses a number of different reading strategies and paradigms that have been used over the years to teach reading and at higher levels to discern meaning from the text, both before and after the digital age. For the purposes of a short blog post I would work with just “close reading” and “hyperreading”. We should already be familiar with close reading, but hyperreading as Hayles uses it involves skimming and picking out meaningful bits, as we are all like to do when using a web browser to do anything.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 As far as putting the two into practice, I would follow what Hayles outlines on page 74; “Close and hyperreading operate synergistically when hyperreading is used to identify passages or to home in on a few texts of interest, whereupon close reading takes over”. This seems to me like a natural result of the changes we have experienced as different mediums and formats of text come into vogue.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 On a personal level, I absolutely believe what Hayles included about our very brains being changed by the way we read text online. She does address the room to argue with the science behind a number of the studies both on the brain itself and through the way we test reading comprehension and retention, but I’m convinced. As she mentioned, “…the shift toward hyperattention is now noticeable with college students” (pg 72). I’ve found that it is necessary for me to restrict myself from chasing hyperlinks and skitting from tab to tab.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 1 I use a chrome extension called “strict workflow”, that once clicked limits the tabs I can open by blocking facebook, reddit, etc. For 25 minutes I am forced to concentrate on only one task, and then it gives you five minutes of freedom before another 25 of dedicated work. It feels very “DH” to me to use any tool available to increase the ease of academic work, even if the connection is abstract.
Good point here about contextualizing the objective of your reading. Contextualization is always important no matter what you are doing and for this particular problem it helps to define what type of reading we are looking at before moving into the effect the Internet has on it.