Week 7: How I read, and why

Having spent the last semester completing a reading course focused on on-screen reading, I was constantly forced to reflect on my own reading habits.

What I found is that the how of my reading, really depends both on what I am reading and why I am reading it. Really it boils down to: what am I trying to accomplish with each reading task.

One characteristic that really affects me when it comes to reading is my ability to focus, a task which is exacerbated when it comes to online reading. It’s a common trope that the online environment is one that encourages multitasking. Katherine Hayles talks about the opposition between hyper attention and deep attention, the former she associates with reading online. For Hayles, hyper attention when applied to reading is an approach where you switch frequently between tasks and have a low tolerance for boredom (187). Reading Hayles work for my reading course, I started to make connections between this idea of hyper attention and my own reading habits.

Now, I want to acknowledge that I don’t necessarily like that I can categorize my attention span as one that is in line with hyper attention, though for some tasks I think it may serve me well. However, as Hayles points out, deep attention is the reading form typically associated with work in the humanities, and reading longer works (187).

With all this being said, I can now point to instances of reading where the form my reading takes is a direct attempt to combat my habit towards hyper attention and multitasking during the reading process.

First, for some class reading I know that I will have difficulty focusing on I use a speed reading tool Spreeder (you can access the tool here if you want to try it out for yourself: http://www.spreeder.com/). Now admittedly, I am not a very fast reader, so I think this tool helps increase my reading speed. However, the real benefit of the tool is that it forces me to pay attention to the text at hand. Spreeder works by showing you one word at a time from your selected text, at a words-per-minute rate determined by you (there are more advanced settings, but I am still sticking with the one-word-at-a-time option).

Here's a snapshot of the interface:

Instead of being distracted by other things going on on your reading device (I use Spreeder on both my iPad and my laptop), the tool forces you to pay attention to the text as it passes on the screen. If you fail to pay attention, you easily lose your place, and backtracking on the tool is very difficult. Now, there are certainly pitfalls to this kind of reading, however, for being able to get a general sense of the text, it works really well for me, and then I find I can go back over the text and pick out relevant details or sections more easily. For instance, I will often go back and supplement this reading using other forms (such as going back and annotating the article on my iPad).

Thinking about this reading habit in relation with this week’s readings, I asked myself: Are e-books (or e-journal articles, or other similar “static” or reflowable digital representations of texts) failing me? Is this why I often choose to speed read first (or sometimes even turn on my iPad’s text to voice application?). The answer is no. There are certainly some situations where I am quite content to read an e-book, or content to read an article PDF. What it comes down to, at least for me, is that some devices work better than others for different kinds of reading – and I think this is a fair statement to make for both electronic and printed texts. No one wants to sit down and read a coffee table size novel from start to finish. Just like how you probably wouldn’t want to read a novel you’re really excited about using Spreeder. How I read, and why, really all comes down to the specifics of each reading context

References:

Hayles, N. K. "Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes." Profession no. 1 (2007): 187-199.