Responding to Hayles and Trask
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Before the internet, reading was usually done in slower, longer units of time than it is done today. However, I think that Carr’s and Hayles’s articles placed too much nostalgic emphasis on these long reading tasks like novels and scholarly articles, forgetting to mention that we still “skimmed” and “scanned” in a fast reading style before the internet. One example of how we did this was with newspapers – we scanned over titles on the page to find an article that caught our interest; when we found one, we likely skimmed the article to get the gist, rather than reading it word for word and all the way to the end (with a few exceptions). Hayles mentions this idea of skimming and scanning in her essay as well:
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 “[Guillory] is not talking here about digital reading but about archival research that requires a scholar to move through a great deal of material quickly to find the relevant texts or passages. He identifies two techniques in particular, scanning (looking for a particular keyword, image or other textual feature) and skimming (trying to get the gist quickly)” (66).
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 Instead of using newspaper reading, Hayles uses the context of scholarly reading to explain the skimming and scanning reading habits. If we acknowledge that these “fast” reading habits have been a part of our scholarly and leisurely reading skills much longer than the internet age, we will be less scared about how the internet is changing us as readers.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 3 With that said, I still agree that our reading is changing with the age of the internet. Hayles details three types of reading: “Close”, “Hyper”, and “Machine” (75). Close reading is the deep, slow type of reading; Hyper reading is on the internet, where hyperlinks, images, and other media are present to enhance the reading experience (or distract from it); Machine reading is “computer-assisted human reading, that is, computer algorithms used to analyze patterns in large textual corpora where size makes human reading of the entirety impossible” (72). Hayles goes on to say that recognizing and taking advantage of the connections between these three reading categories is how we need to move forward with the future of reading.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 2 One example that Hayles gives for combining styles of reading is the “Literature+” class at UCSB, in which one group of students created a Facebook model of Romeo and Juliet (75-76). The aim of the class is to give students traditional Close reading experiences and also help them to use digital tools for literary text analysis. The goal here is not to eliminate Close reading completely, but rather to enhance it with the digital tools and new reading styles available to us today. This sounds like the perfect “happy medium” to me, and I wish it would be implemented in schools sooner so that I could try it out too!
Totally agree. We can’t only condemn skimming, as we note, we have always been skimmers and speed readers. On Monday we were trying to talk about the different types of reading, and I’m sure we’ll continue to go into it today as we go further into Hayles’s essay.
You seem to be saying it’s a little silly to fear skimming and speed reading, then blame it on digital technology. We’ve been doing it for as long as we have been reading. The new fear just becomes that we can’t read any other kind of way. Which is a more valid concern, right? People like Carr seem not to give that as much clarity as we might hope.