I was most interested in Lui’s work about online reading and the necessity of having a complex and detailed definition of that kind of reading. I suppose since there is so much more online than just reading that reading has mutated into something quite different than it was when we did our reading primarily in print. There were no hyperlinks, immediately accessible related reading, the ability to contribute and read comments, the ability to save and pass on the reading itself. The material text is extremely limited in what we can do with it. We can basically read it and write on it. Depending on our purpose with the text, that may be all we need to do with. A 20-page academic article is difficult to read on a screen, our ability to annotate it is limited and clunky if not impossible, and it’s not like you’re going to re-tweet the link, unless you have extremely like-minded friends who have time for that kind of thing. We don’t particularly like to print things out, either, because of cost, or the desire to be green, or the knowledge that’s one more pile of paper we have to juggle, carry around, store, and not lose. Neither medium seems particularly ideal, especially for longer, content-heavy pieces. There is difficulty with lighter reading as well online, especially those with a broader scope aimed at the average reader. These pieces are often poorly researched and hastily produced, we might find the tone engaging or the content interesting, and it encourages us to read it quickly, not ask questions, and disseminate it to our friends. Of course, there’s more to it than that, but the point is, really, that we need an consciousness that is aware and alert to how reading, writing, and our accessed to both changed when they went online. The part of Lui’s definition I found particularly helpful engages “the usage side of the continuum, specific topics of interest include: browsing, searching, scanning, jumping, filtering, aggregating, organizing, and other kinds of discontinuous, low-attention, peripheral-vision, or machine-assisted reading practices that only partially map over predecessor practices of literacy. But also: new ways to focalize or intensify reading among the clutter (as in the ability of RSS and similar tools to create a virtual “my newspaper”).,”
The emphasis on how our attention is divided and diluted by the many, many possibilities the webbiness of the web offers us is, I think, the crux of the “trouble” with online reading practices. The advantages can often function as disadvantages when there isn’t a conscious effort to make these things work for us instead of distract us. I guess this stuck out to me particularly because I personally am so prone to distraction in any setting, so the constant struggle I have to focus on and finish a text that I am either reading or writing on an electronic platform is a huge factor in how I operate. Many of my peers have the same trouble and we talk about how we unplug our routers so that we can focus on just a single thing and not be pulled off by other possibilities and portals offered by the web. Many of my students have this same difficulty with focus, but also with the type of focus and attention they bring to online documents. They are further crippled by lacking critical reading skills, in part because of the broad, information-shallow type of reading that is more easily and quickly available to them online.
This always makes me think about just being aware as a reader about how different texts are generated, by whom, and why. I guess it’s important to cultivate a frame work and a method of reading to apply to the online context that is significantly different from that of traditional text, OR, maybe taking that type of interrogative spirit we tend to have in the humanities and start focusing that on online texts and asking them, “Just what are you trying to do?”