71. Reading in a Whole New Way Worksheet
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America was founded on the written word. Its roots jump from documents—the Constitution, the Proclamation of Independence and, indirectly, the Bible. The country's success depended on loftier levels of literacy, freedom of the press, allegiance to the dominion of law (found in books) and a common language across a continent. American prosperity and liberty grew out of a culture of reading and writing.
But reading and writing, like all technologies, are dynamic. In ancient times, authors oft dictated their books. Dictation sounded like an uninterrupted series of letters, so scribes wrote down the letters in i long continuous string, justastheyoccurinspeech. Text was written without spaces between words until the 11th century. This continuous script made books hard to read, and then merely a few people were accomplished at reading them aloud to others. Existence able to read silently to yourself was considered an amazing talent. Writing was an even rarer skill. In 15th-century Europe only one in 20 adult males could write.
After Gutenberg's printing printing came along around 1440, mass-produced books changed the manner people read and wrote. The technology of printing expanded the number of words available (from near 50,000 words in Old English to a million today). More word choices enlarged what could be communicated. More media choices broadened what was written well-nigh. Authors did non take to etch scholarly tomes but could "waste material" cheap books on heart-rending love stories (the romance novel was invented in 1740), or publish memoirs even if they were not kings. People could write tracts to oppose the prevailing consensus, and with cheap printing those unorthodox ideas could gain plenty influence to topple a king, or a pope. In time, the power of authors birthed the idea of authority and bred a culture of expertise. Perfection was achieved "past the book." Laws were compiled into official tomes, contracts were written down and nothing was valid unless put into words. Painting, music, architecture, dance were all of import, but the heartbeat of Western culture was the turning pages of a book. By 1910 three-quarters of the towns in America with more than two,500 residents had a public library. We became a people of the book.
Today some 4.five billion digital screens illuminate our lives. Words have migrated from wood lurid to pixels on computers, phones, laptops, game consoles, televisions, billboards and tablets. Messages are no longer fixed in blackness ink on newspaper, but flitter on a glass surface in a rainbow of colors as fast as our optics can blink. Screens fill our pockets, briefcases, dashboards, living room walls and the sides of buildings. They sit down in forepart of us when we piece of work—regardless of what we practice. We are now people of the screen. And of course, these newly ubiquitous screens have inverse how we read and write.
The first screens that overtook culture, several decades agone—the big, fat, warm tubes of television receiver—reduced the time we spent reading to such an extent that information technology seemed as if reading and writing were over. Educators, intellectuals, politicians and parents worried securely that the Tv generation would be unable to write. But the interconnected cool, sparse displays of the second wave of screens launched an epidemic of writing that continues to great. The amount of time people spend reading has about tripled since 1980. Past 2008 more than a trillion pages were added to the World wide web, and that total grows by several billion a day. Each of these pages was written by somebody. Right now ordinary citizens compose one.five million blog posts per twenty-four hour period. Using their thumbs instead of pens, young people in college or at work around the world collectively write 12 billion quips per day from their phones. More screens proceed to bang-up the volume of reading and writing.
But it is not book reading. Or newspaper reading. Information technology is screen reading. Screens are ever on, and, unlike with books we never finish staring at them. This new platform is very visual, and it is gradually merging words with moving images: words nil around, they float over images, serving as footnotes or annotations, linking to other words or images. You lot might think of this new medium every bit books we watch, or television nosotros read. Screens are also intensely data-driven. Pixels encourage numeracy and produce rivers of numbers flowing into databases. Visualizing data is a new art, and reading charts a new literacy. Screen civilization demands fluency in all kinds of symbols, not just letters.
And it demands more than our optics. The most physically active we may get while reading a book is to flip the pages or dog-ear a corner. Only screens engage our bodies. Touch screens respond to the ceaseless caress of our fingers. Sensors in game consoles such every bit the Nintendo Wii track our hands and arms. We interact with what we see. Soon enough, screens will follow our eyes to perceive where we gaze. A screen will know what we are paying attending to and for how long. In the futuristic movie Minority Report (2002), the grapheme played past Tom Prowl stands in front of a wraparound screen and hunts through vast archives of information with the gestures of a symphony conductor. Reading becomes almost athletic. Just as it seemed weird five centuries ago to run into someone read silently, in the hereafter information technology will seem weird to read without moving your body.
Books were practiced at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more than utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to inquiry the term, to query your screen "friends" for their opinions, to detect alternative views, to create a bookmark, to collaborate with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the fashion down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this thought with another, equipping u.s. to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. The screen rewards, and nurtures, thinking in existent fourth dimension. We review a film while we lookout it, nosotros come up with an obscure fact in the middle of an statement, nosotros read the owner'south transmission of a gadget nosotros spy in a shop before nosotros purchase it rather than after we go domicile and discover that it can't do what we need it to do.
Screens provoke activeness instead of persuasion. Propaganda is less effective in a world of screens, because while misinformation travels fast, corrections do, too. On a screen it is oft easier to correct a falsehood than to tell 1 in the offset identify; Wikipedia works so well because it removes an error in a single click. In books we find a revealed truth; on the screen nosotros assemble our ain truth from pieces. On networked screens everything is linked to everything else. The status of a new creation is determined not by the rating given to it past critics but by the degree to which it is linked to the rest of the globe. A person, artifact or fact does non "exist" until it is linked.
A screen can reveal the inner nature of things. Waving the camera eye of a smartphone over the bar lawmaking of a manufactured production reveals its price, origins and even relevant comments by other owners. It is as if the screen displays the object'southward intangible essence. A popular child's toy (Webkinz) instills stuffed animals with a virtual graphic symbol that is "subconscious" within; a screen enables children to play with this inner character online in a virtual world.
Equally portable screens go more powerful, lighter and larger, they will exist used to view more of this inner globe. Hold an electronic tablet up as you lot walk along a street, and it will evidence an annotated overlay of the real street alee—where the clean restrooms are, which stores sell your favorite items, where your friends are hanging out. Computer chips are becoming so pocket-size, and screens and then thin and inexpensive, that in the side by side twoscore years semitransparent eyeglasses volition utilise an informational layer to reality. If yous selection upwardly an object while peering through these spectacles, the object's (or identify'due south) essential information volition appear in overlay text. In this way screens will enable us to "read" everything, not only text. Terminal year alone, five quintillion (10 to the power of eighteen) transistors were embedded into objects other than computers. Very presently most manufactured items, from shoes to cans of soup, volition comprise a small sliver of dim intelligence, and screens volition be the tool nosotros apply to interact with this transistorized information.
More important, our screens volition besides watch united states. They will exist our mirrors, the wells into which we look to observe out about ourselves. Not to see our confront, simply our status. Already millions of people use pocketable screens to input their location, what they consume, how much they weigh, their mood, their sleep patterns and what they see. A few pioneers have begun lifelogging: recording every single detail, conversation, picture and activity. A screen both records and displays this database of activities. The consequence of this constant self-tracking is an impeccable "memory" of their lives and an unexpectedly objective and quantifiable view of themselves, one that no book can provide. The screen becomes part of our identity.
We live on screens of all sizes—from the IMAX to the iPhone. In the near future we will never be far from ane. Screens volition be the commencement identify we'll look for answers, for friends, for news, for significant, for our sense of who nosotros are and who we can exist.
Kevin Kelly's book What Technology Wants will be published in October.
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/reading-in-a-whole-new-way-1144822/
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