Category: midterm

Everyone has different views on the question, “Is reading online helpful or harmful?,” but no one is ever really sure of the true answer. Technology may be becoming a huge part of our lives, but it still creates a huge distraction in our every day routine. Reading online has several benefits, but the drawbacks tend to outweigh the benefits. Online reading can result in a lack of concentration, difficulty comprehending, and an inability to fully create images in your mind, as you would when reading an actual book.

To begin with, it may be agreeable that technology plays a very big role in our lives. In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr states “Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the internet does today” (Carr). As his statement may be true, technology can also be extremely distracting. The more we continue to use technology for reading online, the harder it is to stay focused. (Carr). As for me, when I read online, I find a lot of things such as ads that take my attention away from a piece of writing. If the ad is interesting, I will click on it and I am automatically on another page, and it can be difficult to get back to what I was reading. I could even spend hours looking through the ad I had just clicked on. In contrast, an actual book is much easier to follow and keeps me focused for a long period of time. A book is more clearly defined than an electronic screen. As Ferris Jabr explains, “A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of the whole text: one can see where the book begins and ends and where one page is in relation to those borders.” Paper books also give us an opportunity to use the text in any way we want such as highlighting and making notes in the margins (Jabr), which can be difficult to do with an online piece of text.

Secondly, reading online can show a result of difficulty comprehending. Even though technology is all around us and is becoming second nature (Carr), it continues to show that certain individuals still have comprehension issues based on online reading. In an experiment conducted by Erik Wästlund of Karlstad University in Sweden, 72 volunteers completed a Swedish-language reading-comprehension test. This test was a duration of 30 minutes and consisted of multiple choice questions and readings that were at most 1,000 words. As a result, Ferris Jabr states “People who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.” Wästlund conducted a number of studies that showed similar results. Those who had to scroll through the continuous text did not do so well on the attention and working-memory tests. Scrolling drains a lot more energy than turning a page or clicking on a page. Other researchers have come to the conclusion that people comprehend less when they read on a screen because reading on a screen is much more physically and mentally draining than reading on paper (Jabr). I agree that on screen reading is draining both physically and mentally because I experience it all the time. After reading a long article on a screen, my eyes begin to get tired and I no longer want to read the article. If the reading is done on paper, I can read for a very long period of time without experiencing any effects physically or mentally.

Lastly, when reading is done online, because of distraction, it can be difficult to fully create images in the mind as it would be done when reading a book. In the article “The Deep Space of Digital Reading” by Paul La Farge, he talks about an interactive novel called Pry. Along with text, this novel uses “video clips to expose its protagonist’s memories”. While interaction with a novel is a great idea, it still poses a big distraction. It can be very easy to lose sight of certain information. When reading long text online, it does not appear as a book would. It would be difficult to go back into the text to find information because the words may appear jumbled and confusing. With a book, its easy for the brain to remember where on a specific page that information was read (Jabr). In contrast to a website, losing sight of where certain information is on a webpage can be very easy to do by simply scrolling down the page.

There is no telling where reading online will take us in the future. I believe everyone has their own methods of how they understand writing and what they use to understand it. Online reading will most likely continue to be a huge part of our lives because technology, like our phones, is a huge part of our every day. As we continue to rely on technology to help us understand the world, “our own intelligence flattens into artificial intelligence” (Carr). When it comes to reading, paper and ink will always have the advantage.

Works Cited:

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, July 2008.Web. 26 Feb. 2017

Jabr, Ferris. “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens.” Scientific American. N.p., 09 Apr. 2013. Web. 26 Feb. 2017.

In U.S. history, I was taught Cuneiform, developed by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia in 3500 BCE was one the earliest forms of writing. Sumerians drew symbols on clay, metal, stone and wax to communicate, trade goods, track daily events, follow astronomy and write literature. Later, Egyptian hieroglyphs emerged in the Early Bronze Age, which soon contributed to the Latin Alphabet which Americans now refer to as the alphabet. All this goes to show that the world is continuously evolving and progressing. Especially, the technology in the school system. Classes no longer have rusty wooden desks and green chalkboards. Now, lectures and assignments are conducted on smartboards and projectors which teachers control by using computers.  According to the article is “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” the author conveyed that because of technology like cellphones and email, we are reading more than we ever did in previous decades (Carr). Numerous debates have occurred recently on whether schools should promote digital reading or if students comprehend better from paper books. After completing thorough research, I believe digital reading is not detrimental, yet actually beneficial to how we comprehend literature for the future.

For starters, we live in digital age. Almost everything in the 21st century requires us to utilize our online sources. For instance, most test and quizzes in college and highschool are given electronically, also online classes are now offered for multiple subjects. Point Of Sale systems are in nearly every workplace, and Global Positioning Systems are built off the Internet. It is no surprise authors are shifting towards the E-book market. In fact, in the article “The Reading Brain In the Digital Age” the author claimed “e-books currently make up between 15 and 20 percent of all trade books sales”(Jabr).  E-books are rising to popularity because of their convenience. When traveling, you can enjoy any book you please without the hassle of the weight of paper books. E-books are also accessible on many devices such as, Kindles, IPads, Tablets, computers and cellphones. Despite that, the dispute continuously arises concerning if a student comprehends texts better physically or electronically. Well, a study conducted by The University of Leicester found “ students scored equally well regardless of the medium, but differed in how they remembered the information”(qtd in Jabr). Therefore, this evidence proves that digital reading is not harmful to how we comprehend literature. Nevertheless, information retention can differ by the individual and study habits. With this intention, I hope that you can see that E-books may be more fitting for the school’s environment, and digital reading will not alter how students grasp literature.

In addition, the qualities people love most about books are now offered and enhanced onlined. Hyperlinks ultimately played a huge role in this. Hyperlink defined by the dictionary is “an electronic link providing direct access from one distinctive marked place in a hypertext or hypermedia document to another in the same or a different document” (Merriam-Webster). The most common excuse people prefer reading paper books oppose to online articles is because they typically feel that they can interpret text better when it is written on paper. However hyperlinks provide readers with additional information supporting the text. For example, when clicking hyperlinks, a whole array of information can appear ranging from graphics, videos, definitions, and even additional articles. All are very resourceful when writing research papers on subjects you have no prior knowledge of. In contrast, doing research from old-fashioned paper books will limit the amount of information that can be found, and may require you to search through other books which can be a tedious process. On top of that, in the article “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age” the author suggested that, “People also like to have as much control over a text as possible—to highlight with chemical ink, easily write notes to themselves in the margins”(Jabr). While the author is correct, I find annotating literature on paper useful as well, now thanks to websites like Hypothesis and Scribble.com this feature is available online. Readers are now able to highlight in various colors, write in the margins write and discuss articles globally for clarity or to view others stance. All in all, the Internet offers an extreme amount of resources that a paper book can not fulfill.

To demonstrate, I personally do not read paper books as much as I did in my early years, however I read more now because of the Internet than I did before. Social media outlets such as, Twitter, Facebook and blogs allow me to read without feeling obligated. If I am curious about what’s happening around the world economically, politically and socially all I have to do is type in keywords in the search engine and hundreds of articles with responses, and opinions appear. I could discover this same information reading a newspaper, but I never have the urge to since the newspaper only contains the article. Identically, with the dictionary and thesaurus, these books are always available in school, but would you rather flip through six-thousand plus pages to find one word, or just type in the word and get an answer in less than a minute? Not to mention, since, schools have promoted Internet use I have been able to take notes more efficiently, write stronger research papers and complete homework without the heavy load of several books. All beneficial for both teachers and students.

In conclusion, based off the information I gathered from previous articles I feel the education system should continue to adapt to the digital age. I feel we have already made a great deal of progress judging from the computers and access codes we have available in school. However, that is not enough. I was not aware that students are able to annotate online until my second semester in college. If I did not know, imagine the amount of other students who do not know this resource is available. Also, as I mentioned previously I am now capable to take more efficient notes in class. Teachers often convert their lessons into powerpoints which allows me to write down everything that’s important, and refer back to before taking a test. Whereas, in Statistics I find it very hard to take notes because my professor free hand writes his lessons and I often find his handwriting is hard to see and read. All in all, technology should continue to be used and enhanced in our education system.

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 10^th-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.