Reading & writing in the digital age by Dennis Baron
I found an excerpt from Baron's book stimulating in its perspective on the interaction of the reader with text even in print.
"Reading is in itself an act of rewriting. As our minds process the words we read, we create meanings that a writer may never have intended or even imagined possible. In addition, from the days when words first began to be inscribed, readers have always been able to physically annotate what they’ve read, and this too is a kind of textual revision. . . . [T]he invention of the highlighter in the 1970s encouraged readers to take up annotation big time, despite the fact that critics of that new technology griped that highlighting was quite different from marginal comments that actually dialogued with the author. . . . Not only can readers now mark up a [digital] document for their own use, they can also actually remake what they read, seamlessly revising it, transforming it into something completely different, even unrecognizable, even doing so without leaving visible tracks."
Catching a wave I surfed over to another book review and landed on what seems another interesting and relevant blog with a focus on Net Neutrality.
The Technology Liberation Front
"The real problem is not whether machines think but that [hu]m[a]ns do"
"Reading is in itself an act of rewriting. As our minds process the words we read, we create meanings that a writer may never have intended or even imagined possible. In addition, from the days when words first began to be inscribed, readers have always been able to physically annotate what they’ve read, and this too is a kind of textual revision. . . . [T]he invention of the highlighter in the 1970s encouraged readers to take up annotation big time, despite the fact that critics of that new technology griped that highlighting was quite different from marginal comments that actually dialogued with the author. . . . Not only can readers now mark up a [digital] document for their own use, they can also actually remake what they read, seamlessly revising it, transforming it into something completely different, even unrecognizable, even doing so without leaving visible tracks."
I highlight and annotate like crazy when reading print and pdf but as I have been coming to realize with our new skills we are now on the verge of rewriting digital texts--this is both wonderful and frightening.
Catching a wave I surfed over to another book review and landed on what seems another interesting and relevant blog with a focus on Net Neutrality.
The Technology Liberation Front
"The real problem is not whether machines think but that [hu]m[a]ns do"
Deborah, I love the quote you provided about readers creating meaning in their head that may not have been the intentions of the writers. They idea of transforming a text through selection is interesting. I am always fascinated when I ask my students to highlight the main idea, and everyone has a different sentence underlined.
ReplyDelete