Are you a skimmer or a reader?
In the evening, you'll often find me browsing my Instagram Stories in the evening. Bad habit, I know, but it did often inspire my family for field trips and took us to some interesting places.
And only yesterday I stumbled across his post by Peter van Teeseling (@pvantees) who shared the most interesting long read.
I'm a screenshotter and link forwarder Whatever lands in my mailbox = worth the read. That's my bookmarking strategy.
I read. And I wonder. Should skim reading be the new normal? And are we truly losing our ability and aptitude at in-depth reading?
This particular paragraph struck me.
“The possibility that critical analysis, empathy and other deep reading processes could become the unintended “collateral damage” of our digital culture is not a simple binary issue about print vs digital reading. It is about how we all have begun to read on any medium and how that changes not only what we read, but also the purposes for why we read. Nor is it only about the young. The subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy affects us all. It affects our ability to navigate a constant bombardment of information. It incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and demagoguery.”
Abandon hope all ye who read this on a screen? It's not too late, but it will require some re-educating and awareness raising by all of us.
“Human beings need a knowledge of where they are in time and space that allows them to return to things and learn from re-examination – what he calls the “technology of recurrence”. The importance of recurrence for both young and older readers involves the ability to go back, to check and evaluate one’s understanding of a text. The question, then, is what happens to comprehension when our youth skim on a screen whose lack of spatial thereness discourages “looking back.”
Ask me, we haven't pursued knowledge this much to get overwhelmed by fake news and irrelevant content.
Meanwhile, I have two unfinished library books waiting on my nightstand, and this one arrived today.
The irony eh?