Heads up Doug, you might think less of me as a responsible student after this post...
In "Hyper-Readers and their Reading Engines," Sosnoski says, "I have a compulsion to read every word of a printed book I begin to read every word of a printed book I begin to read. Perhaps I enjoy the Web because I feel less guilty surfing it for particular topics and reading only "at the surface"" (167). I, too find myself in this situation every time Doug assigns a PDF reading. If I printed out every PDF that we had assigned, I would kill a small forest. Instead, I take to reading on my tablet. Subsequently, I skim and I filter... I hyper-read. However, when I read a text book, or even get adventurous and print out Doug's assigned readings, I feel bad when I skim and filter. To me, when I read a physical text, I feel as if I am doing the author a disservice by skimming. Somehow, a digital format of the same text dehumanizes the author.
However, technology makes the spread of area in which a text is obtainable enormous. I literally have access to almost any written text at my fingertips. To close-read every single text that I have access to would actually be impossible. On that note, to hyper-read every single text that I have access to would be impossible. By hyper-reading each text that I have assigned, or even that I seek out on my own, makes the girth of information that I am able to obtain much greater. In that aspect, I find hyper-reading useful. I also think that having the skill of close-reading is incredibly useful. Like life, the skills that we hold onto and the skills that we improve upon require balance. As quoted in Hayle's "How We Read" Wolfe says, "We must teach our children to be bitextual or multitextual, able to read and analyze texts flexibly in different ways, with more deliberate instruction at every stage of development on the inferential, demanding aspects of any text" (75).
Dearest Snarky,
ReplyDeleteI am glad you brought up the idea of de-humanization of the author when reading an electronic text. For me, I struggled with the idea that Sosnoski presented of de-authorizing (which you may remember me asking Doug in class the other day, sparking a twenty minute answer about copyright laws, which I actually found incredibly interesting.) When Sosnoski talks about de-authorizing, he talked about it in terms of intellectual property and the way that authors fear that the presence of hypertexts somehow takes away their creative license, or some bullshit like that. Sounds to me like those authors need to grow a pair and put on their big-girl pants. (Which I know is a weird combination of cultural sayings, but I'm just going to need to you run with it...)
Anyways... this idea you presented of de-humanizing. Couldn't we call that a form of de-authorization? As readers of e-texts, we are essentially discrediting the sense of ownership the author has on the text. I realize that this may seem trivial, but for me, terminology makes a big difference. Also, I have OCD (as in, clinically.) Details PISS me off.
I wonder then, after reading your paragraph is this "hyper-reading" is really such a bad thing? I know that some people in class were arguing and struggling with the fact that people are more "aware" of news then they have ever been before, but I can't quite justify calling hyper-reading a fault. Just because they aren't close reading each news article, isn't it a step in the right direction for them to be aware of the fact that it is even happening? I like to think so. But, then we would be de-authorizing the journalist. And that's, you know... that's bad. And stuff.
Now I'm pondering terminologies of the discourse and I need to stop. Laterzzzz.
Ugh I feel you. On Tuesday, a professor assigned 450 pages of reading in a class of mine. Four. Hundred. And. Fifty.
ReplyDeleteCan we read everything on the internet? Can we read everything that is assigned to us in class? Can we even read everything on Facebook closely?
No, of course not. In the famous words of Sugar Brown: "Ain't nobody go time fo dat."
Snososki (Sosonski? or whatever his difficult to spell name is) seems to assume that hyper-reading is only present with digital text, which I certainly don't agree with. I hyper-read nearly every text I'm presented with that I'm not able to read at a leisurely pace (which is most of the time).
I agree that the skill of close-reading is essential--but so is the ability to read and absorb information as fast as possible.