{"id":660,"date":"2016-10-18T04:18:18","date_gmt":"2016-10-18T04:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/?p=660"},"modified":"2016-10-18T04:18:18","modified_gmt":"2016-10-18T04:18:18","slug":"response-to-hayles-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/uncategorized\/response-to-hayles-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Response to Hayles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hayles is discussing a subject that I feel is very important. As a 20 year old who keeps\u00a0about 200 books in my tiny university townhouse, books are my favorite thing in the world. I have been an owner of two Amazon Kindles, the first in high school, which I used to read in class because it was so inconspicuous that the teachers could never tell I was reading behind my textbook, and the second, I begged for for Christmas my sophomore year of college. I got my second Kindle, after the first one broke, and since the day I got it, I haven’t picked it up. For a few reasons, I LOVE reading in print, there’s nothing that compares, secondly, I don’t know where the damn thing is these days, and third, I have no idea where my charging cord is, and if I lost it, the last thing I see myself doing is driving to a store to buy one. These are just a few examples of my own that explain just why digital reading has become a problem. Not only is\u00a0the process of even getting\u00a0on\u00a0<\/em>the Kindle (as I have shown) a problem, but also is the process of reading on it a problem, and reading\u00a0efficiently\u00a0<\/em>I might add. Hayes says, “When decreased print reading, already a cultural concern, is linked with reading problems, it carries a double whammy” and this is exactly true. There is a science behind what is happening in print vs. digital reading. Why and when did print texts take a hit on sales? When digital reading, eBooks, emerged. When did “reading skills (as measured by the ability to identify themes, draw inferences, etc.) have been declining in junior high, high school, college, and even graduate schools” happen? When digital texts, that came with not only Kindles and Nooks, etc., but also blogs, online news, and PDF magazines, flourished.<\/p>\n

I am FOR digital text reading. Once I get going on a Kindle or screen, I don’t have much trouble going on–other than the devil on my shoulder whispering to check Facebook or Gmail on more time. Hayles brought up James Sosnoski and the idea of hyperreading, which is reading off of a Google search by skimming and clicking links. I learn a lot from this, as far as I can tell. If I type in “Shakespeare” into Google for a research paper and click on some credited website that is laid out in tabs of which area of his biography I want to search, I can get my research done quickly and effectively with the help of Google, skimming, and links; versus if I were to take all the time to find a Shakespeare biography in the library, and go through each book Table of Contents (vs. the websites easy Tabs) to see if they have what I’m looking for, then highlight special passages and transfer them through my own labor into a Word document, etc., etc.<\/p>\n

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The words used to describe hyperreading–search engine, skimming, hyperlinks–are words I would expect to see in a word cloud based on digital reading, or close reading using the digital humanities platform. A word cloud about close reading might contain slow, deliberate, absolute, analyze, annotate, mark up, comment. Are these not words a humanist is so very familiar with? In order to get to the point of using these verbs of the close reading word cloud, I believe one must\u00a0first\u00a0<\/em>use the digital reading word cloud verbs. Where would we, as humanists\/English majors be, if we were expected to read Hamlet on printed text paper, as a\u00a0close\u00a0<\/em>read, without the\u00a0hyperreading concept contributing? If I were to read Hamlet, an unbeknownst text to me\u00a0beforehand, without going\u00a0online\u00a0<\/em>to research, in a\u00a0search engine\u00a0<\/em>“Hmm, who is this Shakespeare guy?”, then\u00a0skim\u00a0<\/em>some summary and articles about this stranger, and click\u00a0hyperlinks\u00a0<\/em>to know more about him and his works and the cultural implications that come with his writing, etc., how could I be calling myself a close reader? That’s like reading\u00a0Revolutionary Road\u00a0<\/em>without having done research on the 1950’s, Cold War, WWII, marriage roles, gender roles, Madison Avenue, abortion laws, the American dream, etc., and yet calling it close reading.\u00a0In a perfect world, close reading would work in tandem with digital reading in order to create the best humanistic minds.<\/p>\n

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Hayles is discussing a subject that I feel is very important. As a 20 year old who keeps\u00a0about 200 books in my tiny university townhouse, books are my favorite thing in the world. I have been an owner of two Amazon Kindles, the first in high school, which I used to read in class because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":695,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660\/revisions\/695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}