Hayles, Trask Response
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 2 Before the internet and when people were still interested in reading physical books, close reading was something that everybody did. Because the internet was created, books and news articles and other literary pieces were placed on the internet. Those stories often had their own physical copy, but because they were online, people could access them whenever they wanted. The increase in digital reading has lead to a decrease in reading physical books and in that regard the ability to “close read.” And when people lose one skill they pick up another to replace it; surface reading.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 Articles online are generally short and sweet, giving the reader a fast read to get all the necessary information. People are so used to that that they no longer close read and instead skim the surface to only get the gist of the idea. This is how people lose information or not get enough of it. So you skim twenty spaced out pages within a hundred page text and say that you know what its about. But you don’t. You haven’t read it. People lose so much context when they don’t close read. What is going to happen if the decline of close reading continues? Is the entire definition of reading going to change?
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 The definition of reading has already changed. It changed when the internet was born and with it a virtual on demand text catalogue. It has gone from close reading of slow and thoughtful to a faster pace of skimming the surface and only getting a tenth of the information that you normally would get if you were to read with more caution. To keep up with the world and the fast pace of the internet, reading has become something that also moves at a faster pace. Reading is no longer one dimensional. The increase of different types of literature included in the discipline has changed the way we read. There are graphic novels, which has us looking at pictures. I for one cannot look at a picture for more than a minute before getting bored. The attention span has declined and has had a direct conflict with the way we read. We are no longer slow, careful readers, but fast readers who take things at face value and don’t read further because it takes too much time and energy.
I’m not sure this assertion is totally accurate. I recall recently reading something about how print is still doing very well, in spite of all the hubub about print dying. I think there’s been a shift away from fiction toward non-fiction, but people are still buying and reading physical texts at a healthy rate.
I think this would be a useful avenue for exploration though. Just like we began our class today discussing how people have a sense of the humanities being useless, it seems that our digital era has started the rumor of print being dead/rendered useless and I’m just not sure that’s the case.
How do these two mediums interact with one another? Where do they overlap? Who is using which and at what rate? These are the questions I’d be interested in exploring.
Brittney is correct, and print sales are actually the highest they have ever been at any point in human history. The problem is that there are so many individual titles / books now that rarely do “bestseller” works sell as many copies today as they might have in previous times.
Jerome McGann, by the way, made this exact argument in his essay, which we read a few weeks back, and pointed out that print continues to sell well even as humanist scholars shift their research to online platforms.