I gave a short interview to NPR-KUT’s Teh Texas Standard last week which was broadcast yesterday
Chinese radio on reading
I had the pleasure of being interviewed on Chinese Radio International’s English language station this week. Seems there is a lot of interest there on the impact of new media on people’s reading habits and the government is concerned that the average citizen only reads five books a year. Hum….maybe we’re not so different here, though adults do report reading about 17 per year on average. The trouble with all reading estimates is that people exaggerate, since reading is such a socially-desirable behavior. It’s a bit like that with estimates of library visitations, nobody wants to give the appearance of barbarism so yes, of course we all go there regularly, right? Anyway, the interview was times to mark World Book Day, which seemed to pass most of the world by — HERE’S the link
iSchool faculty in Top 5 UT Inventions of 2014
What is it? Ciaran Trace, assistant professor in the School of Information, and Luis Francisco-Revilla, research associate at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, created software for a large touch-screen, table-top computer called an Augmented Processing Table (APT). The APT helps archivists and curators to better access, share and process both physical and born-digital materials.
Tell me more: The invention garnered the first Archival Innovator Award from the Society of American Archivists in 2013, with the team’s work being described as, “groundbreaking, overcoming professional and philosophical boundaries, embracing innovative ideas and emerging technology, and rethinking current standards and commonly-used models for arrangement and description in modern archives.” Ultimately, APT Research Team’s work will not only help people in the field of archival science follow best practices for processing but also will increase and enhance access to “reliable, accurate and trustworthy collections of information.”
Le Guin 2014 Book Awards Acceptance Speech – no further comment required
Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.
Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write.
Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.
I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. It’s name is freedom.
Thank you.
Daily Texan article picks up this blog
Digital media changes reading habits, according to UT professor
Andrew Dillon, dean and professor in the School of Information, has been conducting research that suggests the way people read online impacts their ability to comprehend texts on paper.
Reading online is ruining my life….
Well not quite but not entirely untrue either. A couple of weeks ago I took a call from a rather persistent journalist at the Washington Post, who wanted to talk to me about the changes that might be occurring in people’s reading behavior as a result of the web. After what I thought was a thorough exchange for more than 20 minutes, I proceeded to forget about this until Monday, when the Post ran a story entitled “Serious reading takes a hit, researchers say.” In it, my comments were reduced to a grammatically questionable single sentence that seemed to suggest support for the idea that the world had changed. OK, any press is good press and if people want to know about this topic, I am happy. My request to have the sentence slightly edited (oh, what one extra ‘s’ can do to the clarity of one’s expression) was not successful but clearly the article was. Within two hours I was being interviewed on CBS Radio News and thirty minutes later, my words broadcast to the world. Curiouser and curiouser, that evening I am contacted by Al Jazeera America and before I know it, I am sitting in a studio in Austin being live broadcast to their network on Consider This. It’s not stopped since and today I am talking to NPR affiliate station KPCC in LA (where you can still listen to the show) then Education Week, and who knows who else later.
(EDIT — Video removed — Al Jazeera apparently only allow video to stay up for 1 week, after which it’s gone….)
The stimulus for all this seems to be the belief (or is it fear?) that human reading has altered radically with the introduction of the web and that the ability to read serious and extended prose is fading. Even adults who learned to read before the onslaught of web publications seem to complain that shifting from the daily routine of email/browsing/scanning of digital documents to the slower pace of book reading is becoming difficult. Couple this with emerging data from brain imagine studies which purport to show different patterns of excitation in the brain depending on your activities and the concern is being expressed that we might be changing our brains in unforeseen ways.
OK, pause and take a deep breath. What is really happening here? Let’s make a few points clear:
1) Reading is an acquired skill. It is one that most cultures place in high regard and in which they invest significant resources to ensure young members of their society acquire this skill. Like all skills, the brain does need to actively adjust to the task.
2) The act of reading is involves all levels of human activity: physical, perceptual, cognitive and social. We tend to think of it only as a perceptual and cognitive act but materials must be located and handled, and the forms of information we share reflect cultural and behavioral norms of groups which manifest as genres and types. Any significant act of reading moves seamlessly among these levels of engagement.
3) In reading, we do judge books by their covers, we do scan headings and layout, we do make multiple decisions on how to engage and we do most of this before we sit down to read an extended text (but please note, most of our routine reading is not really of extended text).
4) The type of publication formats we have known have been relatively stable: incunabula and Penguin paperbacks really don’t differ that much in terms of their affordances and ways of being handled. As a result, the skills learned early on in life for reading were, up until recently, very transferable across most forms of publication.
So what has changed? Well, we have witnessed a significant shift from paper to digital media but the shift itself is not really the issue. We know that text read on screens might be slightly slower to read than on paper and that comprehension might be impacted. Most people are willing to tolerate that for the convenience of carrying multiple documents on a single device. What’s really different however is the ongoing morphing of digital tools to the point that a simple comparison between paper or screen is not so relevant. With digital carriers and interfaces becoming smaller, cheaper, mobile, and capable of multiple functions, the type of information structures we can present digitally have changed and we are seeing different forms emerge that have no simple paper equivalent. As the technology moves, the content providers adjust and, since screen real estate and human attention are at a premium, shorter texts, increased use of animation and color, and a concern with getting the message across quickly all come to the fore. This is the new norm and you probably won’t be seeing too many people reading Proust on their iPhone anytime soon.
Now, what has changed for humans? There are a couple of important things to note. Our basic make-up, meaning our physical form and cognitive architecture, are not changing quickly. We still have finite attention, limited capacity working memory, a tendency to be distracted by movement, a perceptual span that limits the number of words we can read at a time, a desire for structure etc. In any full reading process involving extended text. we run through the range of responses to a document from short-term decisions to full, immersive engagement over time. With most of the material we read during the working day and online, we often aren’t willing to commit to the full range and stop after scanning. Content providers know this and produce accordingly. Add to this the delivery of digital material on a platform that is constantly refreshing, updating and allows users to multi-task across applications, and the results are a series of short acts involving the perusal and reaction to messages and short form texts that break up the normal progression through deep reading tasks.
Is this bad? Not if your goal is to keep on top of changing contexts and identify facts. Yes if you want to read a novel or really study a technical report. It’s not that we must use paper for the latter but we must create some time and isolation from distraction to do so comprehensively. That is a fact of our own psychological make-up; it is not really a limitation of the technology (ignoring some form factors for now). The problem that worries people now is if spending too much time with digital devices might somehow diminish your ability to read deeply, even if you make the switch to appropriate medium (e.g., a book) for deeper study.
We can add to this concerns with the adoption of new mobile tools in schools, and if this then distorts the education of readers by emphasizing one form of reading over another. The fear is that young minds never learn to appreciate the benefits of longer form documents and certainly are not required to develop the skills needed to exploit these benefits appropriately. There is talk a new bi-literacy, or bi-literate gap emerging and of course, older (if not wiser) heads worry that human civilization will crumble as the full reading of Shakespeare is replaced by students who can only tweet the odd phrase of a soliloquy. Or the related fear that nobody will remember anything anymore as they will convince themselves that it’s all in the cloud somewhere, and they only need to Google it for an answer.
Well, technology is always going to ruin us, so why should the web be any different? I remember only snatches of Hamlet’s speech now and I also recall students who felt that photocopying an article for their personal use was as good as reading it. Plus ca change. There is certainly a set of questions related to human reading that warrant our attention right now but the imminent collapse of culture as a result of digital scanning is not the one I would spend most of my time on. I do think however that we should try to be a little more self-conscious of our reading habits and remember that sometimes, to really get to the heart of the document, we need to give the reading process a chance to fully occur.