In today’s world, everyone is in a rush and people just expect something to be given to them. Nobody has the time to wait for anything whether it is a traffic light, their coffee brewing, or even researching something for their job. Few people stop to take the time to do the work. Then, people just expect everything to be handed to them. Almost everyone has a smart phone that can allow them to go on the Internet. Having this smart phone is taking the easy way out instead of just going to a newsstand and reading the newspaper. When weighing out the positives and negatives of reading online, the negatives are more dominant with reading online, then reading a physical hard copy book.
Reading online causes people to skim over a reading, lose focus, and not retain information about the reading. Every person’s attention span is different but for the most part everyone’s attention span is very short. Trying to keep someone’s attention is hard enough as of now with any other distractions, but when someone has the Internet at their fingertips it becomes ten times harder because the person has an outlet for escape. In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Nicholas Carr states, “They found that people using the sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would ‘bounce’ out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it” (Carr). Here is a perfect example of how short a person’s attention span is. They are reading and then sees something pop up on the computer that looks more interesting. They are going to click on whatever looks interesting and will lose concentration on whatever the reading just was. They will not take the time to stay and read the full reading because they do not want to read it or they have lost interest in the reading. In the article, “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens”, Ferris Jabr gives an example of a study that proved that reading online is not as beneficial as reading a physical hard copy book. In 2013, Anne Mangen and her colleagues tested to see which would do better with comprehension, online or paper readings. They gave it to 72 10th-graders with similar reading ability and gave half the online reading and the other half the paper reading. After the kids finished reading, they all took a comprehension test that was comprised of multiple choice and short answer. The students that read online did worse on the test than the kids that read the paper copies (Jabr). The students that were given the digital reading did worse because of a few possibilities. One possibility is that the students got sidetracked and wandered off onto something else. Another possibility is that the students did not have all the benefits that the students with the paper copies had. The students with the paper readings could write down important facts in the margins of the readings and could underline important facts. The only thing that the students with the online reading could do was just read the reading because they did not have the ability to write down important facts that they found. These two examples both show the negative effects of reading online. In Carr’s article, it states about the reader skimming instead of reading. In Jabr’s article, it shows a case study of how reading online is less efficient when it comes to having to recall the information someone just read. I feel that the students in the study that read online were skimming their readings and or they got distracted.
On the other hand, some people see the positive effects of reading online but they do not see the real disadvantages of reading online. Many digital articles are starting to add hyperlinks to give more detail and to also support their article. In the article, “The Deep Space of Digital Reading”, Paul La Farge states, “Meanwhile, some writers are taking advantage of the formal possibilities of digital media to tell stories and communicate information in new ways. One of these new forms is what people in the 1990s called ‘hypertext’: text divided into units called ‘lexia,’ which are connected by links, sometimes in a branching or tree-like structure, sometimes in webs or cats’-cradles or other tangled forms. (Technically, the Web is a hypertext, but the word often refers to single works with an internally linked structure)” (La Farge). When someone clicks on a hyperlink, the hyperlink will take that person to another site to give more information, but what happens when that hyperlink is a link to YouTube or another entertainment site. You have all those other videos at your disposal and it then becomes an easy access for you to lose track of what you were currently doing. It is another disturbance that you must deal with. When you read something on paper, there is no excuse for you to get interrupted. In the article, “Plagiarism is Dead; Long Live the Retweet: Unpacking an Identity Crisis in Digital Content”, Susanne Murphy states, “Online reading is constructive and dynamic: while reading for information, clicking across and through a variety of embedded and suggested links, each reader creates a unique (and transient) new text whose reality is physical only in a ‘follow the clicks’ sense” (Murphy). Susanne Murphy is talking about allowing your online research to expand and to take you places that are beneficial. When you are investigating for some information and having to dig and dig through tons of sites and data, just to find out what is correct and truthful material, it can become a hassle. “Follow the clicks” means that you now must take more time out of your day to just read and review the site, author, and evidence just to find out if you can use it as a good source. You will find and go through more false information that actual real information. When an author writes a book, the author has already gone through all the false evidence and has provided you with the correct data. It is easier to take the physical book and use that information instead of having to examine it all yourself and then decide for yourself what is right and what is wrong.
Having a reading online just requires you to do more work than what you wanted to, for example I am taking a biology class right now that required an online textbook and I cannot stand to use the textbook. This textbook confines me so much that it makes it harder for me to learn. The best way that I learn, is to write something down or underline the important facts. This online textbook takes away from me learning. It highlights what it thinks is significant for me to know for the tests and exams instead of allowing me to do it for myself so I can learn. I love to write things down in the margins of my books that I have question about or additional things that my teachers say about a specific topic. I cannot write things down in the margins of this online textbook because the textbook will not allow me to do such a thing. I never sit down and just read this textbook because I have the world at my fingertips. I wonder off onto Facebook, Twitter, and retail shopping websites instead of reading because it is online. Due to this textbooks restriction, I am not doing too well in the class and I cannot understand any of the topics that my teacher teaches the class. This is one of the biggest reasons that I do not like to use or even read something online. I hate to read anything online because of all the struggles that I have had with this biology textbook.
Yes, the future is moving towards technology, but I feel that we should keep physical books in use. There are just some things that just need to stay the way that it has always been and having a physical book is one of those things that should not change. Somethings should and could be online like magazines, news articles, emails, and thing like that; but things like textbooks for school and research books should still be on paper. It makes it so much easier for the person doing the research or learn in the classroom.