Is reading dead?

I recently came across this article, Dawn of the Digital Natives (in the Technology section of the Guardian website), about changes in reading habits which have resulted from the rapid burgeoning of the internet. The author, Steven Johnson, argues that reading is not dying, contrary to the beliefs of an bunch of apparent scaremongers at the American organisation ‘National Endowment for the Arts’ who published a study on the issue, To Read or Not To Read, in November 2007. The author of the NEA study makes the somewhat bold claim that:

“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media, they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”

Wow! Does he mean that any reading we do on a screen as opposed to on the printed page somehow does not count? The point is, [cont...]

[...cont] Johnson says, that what, where and how we read is changing, and the study simply fails to take into account all the reading that people do online.

OK, so I’ve occasionally come across people in the careers world who think like the NEA too, but they do tend to be pretty rare these days. Most people do now seem to see electronic ‘content’ as having a valid role to play in the student learning experience. It’s just that we don’t always know how to do it well. There are still cases where we just put something up on the web which was originally developed as a 10-page booklet. This is invariably followed by the complaint that “those damn students just can’t be bothered to read anymore”. But if we’re completely honest with ourselves, exactly how often would we be prepared to download a 10-page article and read it from beginning to end?

Seriously, I believe we do need to think differently about how we write for the web. This means taking into account the fact that the internet has probably changed the way we find research and get information (and thus to an extent the way we read) for good. A recent piece of research conducted by University College London on behalf of the British Library and JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee), ‘Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future‘, debunked the myth of a so-called ‘Google generation’ that behaves differently from the rest of us. The study, published in January 2008, found that:

“Research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors.”

So it really isn’t just “those damned students” with their 20-second attention spans apparently. We’re all like this! And if we’re all like this, we should be able to figure out what makes for good web reading matter, shouldn’t we? Hmmm…

I’ve been thinking about all of this a lot recently, as I’m looking at the whole issue of how we produce quality content (and not just what we call ‘quality content’ but stuff that people actually want to read!) for the careers website here at Manchester at the moment. In fact, I’ve signed up for the AGCAS training event ‘Developing Electronic Content‘ in March. The last one they ran was so popular I didn’t get my name down quickly enough! Usually an indication that we’re all thinking and needing the same thing…

Anyone else out there pondering these issues? I’d love to hear your thoughts!