I see by the snailpapers that a new word for "reading" on screens has been coined, called SCREENING.....

Are you reading this on a paper printout? Or are you
"screening" it on a computer screen? How you answer
this question might determine whether you get to the bottom of the blog post.

Alex Beam, writing in a commentary in the Providence
Journal in 2008, asked: "Do we
read differently on the computer screen from how we
read on the
printed page?" His original column in the Boston Globe was headlined:
"I screen, you screen, we all screen."

The answer to Beam's question is, of course, yes.

From most of the
research that has come in so
far from academics in
North America and Europe, the answer is clear, although not everyone's
in agreement with what it all means.

So may I coin a new word for screen-reading and call it "screening"?
There, I just did.

Yes, I know, "screening" has multiple meanings. We screen movies, we screen job
candidates, we screen
patients for medical problems.

And reading also has multiple meanings:
we read faces, we read maps, we
read the weather, we read minds. Oh, and we read newspaper articles,
too.

I am going out on a limb
by saying that reading on screens is not reading per se, but a new
kind of human mode of reading, and I now
call it "screening."

Of course, most PHD-anchored academics and technophiles disagree with me. And that's
okay. But hang on. The story has legs.

And with two new gadgethead-oriented books making waves nationwide
this summer, William Powers' "Hamlet's BlackBerry" and Nicholas Carr's
"The Shallows," we are going to talking about the pros and cons of
reading on paper versus reading on screens for a long
time to come. I foresee a hundred more years of this, before the dust settles.

Anne Mangen at the
University of Stavanger in Norway told me in an email that she not
sure "screening" will work
in the way I propose. She told me: "My first
impression is that the term 'screening' is adequate in some
respects, but not in others. It's adequate to the extent that it
points to certain differences in the reading mode which has to do with
the display nature, the central bias of a screen compared to a page of
print text (our gaze is naturally oriented towards the center), and
the image-like character of modalities (we tend to read a screen
spatially, in contrast to the page which we linearly)."

Mangen, in a widely-read 2008 academic paper, listed a few reasons
that reading on paper
and reading on a screen are so very different.

* Reading on a screen is not as rewarding -- or effective -- as
reading printed words on paper.

* The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical
manipulation of the
computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and
appreciate what we're reading.

* Online text moves up and down the
screen and lacks physical dimension, robbing us of a feeling of
completeness.

* The visual happenings on a compter screen and our physical interaction
with the entire device and its set ip can be distracting. All of these things
tax human cognition and concentration in a way that a book or
newspaper or magazine does not.

* The experience of reading a book or a newspaper or a magazine is
both a story experience and a tactile one.

The jury's still out on just how different reading on paper is
from reading on a screen, but the public discussions in the blogsphere
are getting interesting -- and heated. However, more and more, top experts
in the computer and Internet fields, as well as typeface designers and
readability gurus, are in agreement that we might need a new word
for reading on screens, and that the word might be "screening." For
now. A completely new word might come down the road in
the future in a completely natural and organic way. I'm waiting.

When I asked Kevin Kelly, the well-respected writer and founder of
Wired magazine,
what he felt about this
new word for reading on screens, he told me by email in one short sentence: "I
would be happy to see screening become a verb (for this)."

Mim Harrison, a book editor in Florida with Levenger Press, told me: "I find the
distinction between reading and screening to be intriguing, and it
certainly gives us all pause to consider just what it is we're doing
with our eyeballs these days."

"Screening, of course, is not a new term," Paul Saffo, a top expert in
predicting
the future told me in an email. "But this might just be the
time that it catches on in the way you suggest. Screening is a clever
and useful term capturing the fact that the
experience of reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading
on paper. Not a priori worse or better; just different."

And then he added this important note: "It is the right word for the
moment in terms of drawing people's attention to the vast literary
shift about to wash over us."

I believe that future MRI scans of the human brain while people are
tested while reading on paper and reading on screens will help
us understand the issue better. This work is being done now in
a few research labs around the world and the results will be very interesting,
to say the least.

One medical doctor told me that he feels that "scanning" the brain
while reading on paper or off a screen, either through MRI or PET-scans,
won't be able to answer any questions about the better experience or health of a
particular modality. "We dontt know enough about the brain to tell
which would be better, even if different areas of the brain are
active," he said.
"Most of the stuff we do with this research is really limited in
determining formal conclusions."

Another writer on technology issues told me: "Speaking of 'screening'
as a new word for reading on screens, if one calls for MRI tests to
investigate its difference from reading, isn't that a form of
screening, too, privileging an image on an electronic display? A
better test would be not telling the subjects the real purpose of the
experiment, letting some read and comment on a text displayed in a
printed book or on a computer screen or on a reader (e-ink or TFT),
and then let raters, also unaware of the real purpose, look for
differences in what people write after different modes."

Let the tests begin!

And now, just to end on a happy note: When I asked a middle-aged book
editor in Taiwan, Linden Lin, whether he was concerned that the
digital age might do away
completely with printed books someday, he smiled
and said, "We're still using candles for some things, aren't we?"

Yes, some things endure.

Bonus link to 2-minute YouTube video
about screening and reading

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0