Chesapeake Meanderings (formerly
The Fisherfolk Philosopher)
Vol. 2, No. 2 --
January 2, 2005
Reading and the
Internet:
BROWSING
AND READING IN THE AGE OF THE
HYPERLINK
By Allan Roy Andrews
ANNAPOLIS, MD --
(January, 2005) —
Remember the time you turned to the dictionary to look up a word and
got sidetracked by another word or words along the way, eventually
closing the book before finding the word you sought in the first place?
There's a subtle pattern in this activity that's important to
understanding the modern mind of adolescence, and especially the mind
of the adolescent reader.
That you are reading this column indicates, I suspect, that you are one
of those persons who picks up a newspaper or goes online for leisure,
sits, and relaxes by scanning some generally innocuous words. O.K., so
you're doing so now with a computer, but, admit it, you still like to
read the newspaper.
Modern adolescents are far less likely to engage in such activity.
A study of young readers and where
they get their news—a study now almost a decade old—
indicates that
young adult readers claim to read the newspaper about three times a
week, and that's the high reader group.
You've heard it from many quarters, no doubt, especially from
educators, that today's teens simply do not read. It's wrong to call
them illiterate, but they may be a-literate; that is, they know how to
read but prefer not to.
That assertion, however, needs careful elaboration. High school
students do not read the things they are assigned to read by teachers.
They are indifferent—notoriously indifferent—to reading
anything that
they are assigned to read or ordered to read by others.
They choose to go against most things intellectual that have an adult
flavor, and that includes the adult habit of keeping up on the news
through newspapers. Most teenagers, faced with the prospect of a fresh
newspaper newly delivered and still encased in its plastic wrap, will
pull out the comic section or the sports section--just as most adults
did when they were learning to read the newspaper.
Nevertheless, the assertion that
teenagers do not read is blatantly untrue!
Their reading, however, is more often than not in a form that many
adults are only beginning to experience and understand. (As you are
because you've come to this Web site to read what is basically an
opinion column similar to many in the daily newspaper. To grasp what
I'm arguing here, consider how you arrived at this Web site!)
When I say teenagers are reading in a different manner, I speak of a
reading that depends heavily on hyperlinks, and hyperlinks are the
basic stepping stones of reading on the Internet
Reading on the Internet is, I think, much like getting caught up in the
exploration of words while looking up a specific word in the
dictionary. One just never knows where the trail is leading, and while
one has some control over which hyperlinks to follow, there is a path
that becomes almost irretrievable once the first two or three links are
opened.
In the old days of newspapering, the
rigid principal of the inverted pyramid guided journalists, and while
that principal is still at work in many news stories, its rigidity has
been greatly relaxed. According to the inverted pyramid model, the most
important elements of a story must appear in the first few paragraphs;
in fact, the opening paragraph is to contain most of what is determined
to be "new." Second and third paragraphs become supporting or
buttressing paragraphs of what was introduced in the lead. For many
people confronting the daily newspaper, reading beyond the first few
paragraphs is unnecessary.
By virtue of its physical presentation to readers, the Internet also
demands a "lead" and supporting information below. Many of the popular
search engines charge a premium for the upper echelons of their
listings; thus, one sees "sponsored results" topping off many search
listings. These essentially are nothing more than paid-for leads.
Similarly, most news sites on the World Wide Web provide simply a lead
to the story, often with a headline that is a hyperlink. One reads the
lead and clicks the hyperlink to get to the story in its fullness.
The point of the matter is this: What
we have known as "browsing" a newspaper (or even the library shelves,
for that matter) has been revolutionized by the Internet and the Web.
Browsing is no longer a leisurely scan or a chance glance; instead, it
has become a kind of electronic hopscotch, a multiple checker game jump
on an unlimited board with no squares.
The reading skills of a newspaper reader and an Internet reader are
essentially identical, but the dynamics are miles—and
generations—apart.
Hyperlinks, virtually unknown two decades ago, have become commonplace,
not only in advertising and popular literature such as magazines, but
in scholarly research. Look at a bibliography on a scholarly paper
that's been written in the past five years. There's a good chance it
has more hyperlinks than references to books.
Teenagers haven't stopped reading;
they've simply stopped reading the way most adults were taught to read.
Once we grasp this, we may recognize that the hyperlink is as
revolutionary as the double helix.
The other side—perhaps the frightening side—of this sort of
reading, of
course, is that it tends to randomness and disorganization; some might
even say to chaos.
Nevertheless, there are those who argue that genuine learning emerges
more from chaos than from organization! But that's another avenue to
explore, and I haven't reached that hyperlink just yet.
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Allan R. Andrews can be reached at arandrews@toadmail.com