TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

“Screening”, “Screeding,” or “Reading”: which do you like?

By a TeleRead Contributor

Editor’s Note: Danny Bloom is a freelance writer based in Taiwan. He blogs about “screening” issues and welcomes all comments pro and con. Paul Biba

TAIPEI, TAIWAN — Are you reading this commentary — or — are you screening this? Or screading it, even? How you answer the question will determine whether you get to the bottom of this.

Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe on June 19, fired the first volley in this now-national discussion.

“Do we read differently on the computer screen from how we read on the printed page?” Beam asked rhetorically. His column was headlined by a savvy Globe copyeditor: “I screen, you screen, we all screen.”

The answer to Beam’s question is, of course, yes! From most of the research that has come in so far from academics in North America and Europe, the answer is clear, although not everyone’s in agreement with what it all means.

Perhaps some future MRI brain scan studies will show us how different parts of the brain light up when we read on paper compared to when we read on a computer screen or a Kindle? I think scientists will crack this soon.

Yes, “screening” already has multiple meanings, so can we really call screen-reading “screening”? For example, we screen movies, we screen job candidates, we screen patients for medical problems, we do a lot of “screening” in this world of ours.

As for “reading,” we read books, we read maps, we read minds, we read palms, we read the clouds, we read lots of things.

When I asked Dr. Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger in Norway what she thought about perhaps using the word screening” for reading on a screen, she told me in an email: “My first impression is that the term ’screening’ is adequate in some respects, but not in others. It’s adequate to the extent that it points to certain differences in the reading mode which has to do with the display nature, the central bias of a screen compared to a page of print text (our gaze is naturally oriented towards the center), and the image-like character of modalities (we tend to read a screen spatially, in contrast to the page which we linearly).”

Dr Mangen, in an important academic paper published in Britain last December of 2008, listed a few reasons that reading on paper and reading on a screen are two very different animals.

* Reading on a screen is not as rewarding — or effective — as reading printed words on paper.

* The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical manipulation of the computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and appreciate what we’re reading.

* Online text moves up and down the screen and lacks physical dimension, robbing us of a feeling of completeness.

* The visual happenings on a compter screen and our physical interaction with the entire device and its set ip can be distracting. All of these things tax human cognition and concentration in a way that a book or newspaper or magazine does not.

* The experience of reading a book or a newspaper or a magazine is both a story experience and a tactile one.

The jury’s still out on just how different reading on paper is from reading on a screen, but the public discussions in the blogsphere are getting interesting — and heated. But more and more, top experts in the computer and Internet fields, as well as typeface designers and readability gurus, are in agreement that we need a new word for reading on screens, and that the word should be “screening.” For now. A completely new word might come down the information highway in the future and take the place of screening. But for now, you screen, I screen, we all screen.

We asked Kevin Kelly, the well-respected maverick of Wired magazine, what he felt about this new word for reading on screens, he told us by email in one short sentence: “I would be happy to see screening become a verb (for this).”

Mim Harrison, a book editor in Florida with Levenger Press, said: “I find the distinction between reading and screening to be intriguing, and it certainly gives us all pause to consider just what it is we’re doing with our eyeballs these days.”

“Screening, of course, is not a new term,” a top expert in predicting the future told us in a recent email, but this might just be the time that it catches on in the way you suggest. Screening is a clever and useful term capturing the fact that the experience of reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading on paper. Not a priori worse or better; just different.”

And then he added this important note: “It is the right word for the moment in terms of drawing people’s attention to the vast literary shift about to wash over us.”

When we asked technology reporter John Markoff at the New York Times about this idea, he replied in a one-word email note: “Hmmmmmmm.”

We asked David Pogue at the New York Times the same question, and he said: “Very interesting.”

We asked another top specialist in the field, a former MacArthur genius award winner, what he felt about a new word for reading on screens, and he said: “I rather like ’screading’.”

So, dear Reader, er, Screener, er, Screader, what is your point of view on all this? Do we need a new word for reading on a screen, and what might that word be? Any more suggestions? Dish!