Much of our time is spent moving from screen to screen: from computer to cellphone, from television to movie theater, from GPS to music player. As Kevin Kelly wrote in The New York Times Magazine,“We are becoming people of the screen . . . we are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift - from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.”
Critics have long warned that electronic media would destroy reading, but what it seems to be doing is redefining what it means to read. A book is no longer just a book, and the action of reading has morphed from flipping through chapters to clicking from link to link.
“I think we have to ask ourselves, ‘What exactly is reading-’ ” Jack Martin, an assistant director for young adult programs at the New York Public Library, told The Times’s Motoko Rich. “Reading is no longer just in the traditional sense of reading words in English or another language on a paper.”
For younger people, the experience of reading is a collective one. Zachary Simms, a teenager in Connecticut, told Ms. Rich that he read articles on up to 100 Web sites. “The Web is more about a conversation,” he said. “Books are more one-way.”
Some say that while children are reading online, they are learning how to do research and interpret videos and pictures. Next year, more than 50 countries will test these skills with an electronic component to reading, math and science assessment tests, Ms. Rich wrote.
If sitting down with a book seems too time-consuming , how about luring readers with a video game - That is what PJ Haarsma did when he wrote a science-fiction novel. “You can’t just make a book anymore,” he told Ms. Rich. Other writers, teachers and librarians are turning to video- or Web- based games to extend storytelling beyond book covers and spark an interest in books among young people.
Interested or not, college students are often required to buy pricey textbooks . According to The Times’s Randall Stross, some have resorted to scanning textbooks and making them a free download on file-sharing sites like PirateBay.org. Pirate Bay, a company based in Sweden, may present a challenge to many textbook publishers, wrote Mr. Stross.
R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at the California Institute of Technology, put his book online, Mr. Stross wrote , raising the possibility that all textbooks might eventually migrate online. “We have lots of knowledge,” Mr. McAfee said, “but we are not getting it out.”
A laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is taking a look at what information is getting out there. David Kirkpatrick, the founder of the Center for Future Storytelling, believes that Hollywood’s ability to tell a meaningful story has been corroded by text messages and Twitter. The center predicts that the traditional dramatic arc of a story is in trouble, wrote The Times’s Michael Cieply.
But the linear logic of a book - a product of the printing press that was defined by storytellers from Homer to Shakespeare to Garcia Marquez - may be no more. Amid the Web’s many incarnations, nothing is as self-contained as a book.
Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University, told Ms. Rich that young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line. That’s a good thing, because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”