Deep Reading in the Age of Internet

Background
Reading first of all does not come naturally.  Unlike speaking and listening, reading a word and recognize its meaning in a sentence, in a paragraph or in a book takes years of training.

As we grow and reading skill advance, we start to develop deep reading.  Deep reading or slow reading, is a sophisticated process in which people can critically think, reflect and understand the words they are seeing on the page.  With most, that means slowing down — even stopping and rereading a page or paragraph if it doesn’t sink in — to really capture what the author is trying to say.

Experts warn that without reading and really understanding, it is impossible to be an educated citizen of the world, a knowledgeable voter. or even an imaginative thinker.

Concerns
The concern that deep reading is going by the wayside is a phenomenon that may have something to do with our use of technology and our habits while browsing the Web.

Just last summer, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he was concerned about what he sees as a decline in slow reading. Instant messages and 140-character tweets appear to be taking over our ability to concentrate on a single idea or theme in a book.

Marshall McLuhan once noted: Media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. Internet and the Web is shaping who we are and how we read.

It’s easy to forget the benefits of deep reading in an age where anything worth doing is done fast, or not at all.  Canadian author John Miedema says that we surf the Internet, gather snippets of information and click hyperlinks that bring us to different topics and authors, he says. In less than a second, we can go from reading about Beethoven the composer to watching a clip about Beethoven the St. Bernard online.

Here is a short video explain several key benefits of reading.

Distracted Readers and Short Memory Cycle

The Web is essentially a distraction machine. Hyperlinks are meant to take you away from where you are.

One research indicated that “Nowadays, access to information is digital: less than 0.1% of the information currently generated is on paper. 99.9% of the information is only digitally available. Every minute, 2 million searches are made in Google.

The average number of Google searches per day has grown from 9,800 in 1998 to over 4.7 trillion today This may not be surprising, since we've all come to appreciate the thrill of instant information. But while it's certainly convenient to have the sum of all knowledge at our fingertips, studies show that the "Google effect" is changing the way we think.

In a 2011 experiment published in Science Magazine, college students remembered less information when they knew they could easily access it later on the computer. With 49% of Americans now toting around Google on their smart phones, researchers concluded that the effect is the same. We're relying on Google to store knowledge long-term, instead of our own brains.

Neuroimaging of frequent Internet users shows twice as much activity in the short term memory as sporadic users during online tasks. Basically, our brain is learning to disregard information found online, and this connection becomes stronger every time we experience it. So the more we use Google, the less likely we are to retain what we see.

Our brains use information stored in the long-term memory to facilitate critical thinking. We need these unique memories to understand and interact with the world around us. If we rely on Google to store our knowledge, we may be losing an important part of our identity.

Check out this cool short video explaining the prolong effect of internet on human memory and reading habits

Changing reading pattern

Before the emergence of the multimedia contents on the Internet, people are trained and used to the traditional linear reading which is up to bottom, left to right. The writers use this to lay out structure and contents and the readers use this to follow the thought process of the writers. Now the reading pattern has changed. To be more adaptive on reading out of a webpage, people are now developing F-Pattern reading.

The F-Pattern describes the most common user eye-scanning patterns when it comes to blocks of content. F for fast. That’s how users read your content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your websites page.

The pattern was popularized by NNGroup eyetracking study which recorded more than 200 users looked at thousands of web pages and found that users’ main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This reading pattern looked somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.   Next, they scan a vertical line down the left side of the screen, looking for points of interest in the paragraph’s initial sentences. When they found something interesting they read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.  Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement.

Our eyes are trained to start at the top-left corner, scan horizontally, then drop down to the next line and do the same until we find something of interest.

The NNGroup demonstrates how eye-tracking studies revealed that users (in left-to-right reading cultures) typically scan heavy blocks of content in a pattern that looks like the letter F or E. The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn’t attract any fixations.

Many online news platforms are using F-Pattern to get people’s attention and increase the site visits.
Below is an example by CNN.

Efforts to Encourage Deep Reading
There are many efforts to encourage people to come back and pick up this deep reading skills. Below are two of them.

RAVE-O - Strategies of Teaching Reading
http://www.voyagersopris.com/curriculum/subject/literacy/rave-o/take-a-closer-look

Thinking reader – Center for Applied Special Technology's (CAST)
http://udleditions.cast.org/INTRO,telltale_heart.html

References:

http://babich.biz/f-shaped-pattern-for-reading-content/
http://www.mercurynews.com/2011/01/04/is-deep-reading-in-trouble-2/