Reading on the web is not really reading

Venturer

So not watching the news is bad, but why is reading on the web not really reading?

Or does one of your sub-editors need a break.

Yours in irony, having read this on the web (perhaps this explains my confusion)

Charlie

I just read this on the web. Better get the hard copy just to make sure I read it properly.

Alexander

You can read trash in hard copy just as easily as in soft copy. You can find more and more high quality books on line -- especially rare/out-of-print additions. One just needs to be selective in one's choices.

I also disagree about video-games. They are a huge improvement over television because you've actually got to do something, instead of passively watching. Sure, reading and thinking would be better still, but far better a video-game addict than a "couch potato"

Christopher Chantrill

Susan Jacoby belongs to a subculture of intellectual Pharisees that pray to themselves thus: I thank not-God that I am not as others are: anti-intellectual, irrational, bigoted, shallow.

But she complains about a world that she and her progressive pals created. Only she has not read widely enough or deeply enough to grasp it.

In a world where your education is paid for, your health care free-at-the-point-of-delivery, your material well-being guaranteed by a blanket of "social protection" why bovver about anything, never mind reading a book?

Stan Wolarz

Good article,ineptly titled.As a long-term expat,I value the web's choice of reading material immensely,and what's more,I have ready access to many interesting publications,many(probably most)of which I would never have encountered without the web.So much for the title.
As for the article - well,yes,the dumbing-down continues,but it's no fault of the web,choices can be made.Do none of these educators consider pointing students at sites of interest?

Not Even Likely

While your concern seems genuine, and even well-placed, I haven't seen what you describe. Both my daughters are avid readers. The libraries in their schools were and are up-to-date and well-used. Their friends read - and to them there's no party like a book release party at midnight at Barnes and Noble! The community I live in has a community-wide summer reading cooperative, which my adult daughter participated in. (I HATE to read things other people tell me to!) I read the internet and books. Sometimes I read books recommended by columnists on the internet! (Frank Furedi comes to mind.) And the public library is stuffed with people all weekend long, and to get the cool books, you always have to go on a waiting list. Also, I am aware of the US casualties in Iraq, and I ONLY read news on the interet. Perhaps because my husband is hard of hearing - I have to leave the room when he watches the news.

Rory Sutherland

Quote: "A more revealing comment in the same article came from a high-school student, Hunter Gaudet, who observed that he never read books unless forced to do so and said that ‘they go through a lot of details that aren’t really needed’. He added, ‘Online just gives you what you need, nothing more or less.’"

Slightly reluctant to admit this, folks, but I rather agree with young Hunter, who seems a perceptive chap.

Most books nowadays, even really good books, *are* 70% too long.

But you can't charge £14.95 for a pamphlet, unfortunately. Hence the need for 200 pages of repetitive padding.

And as for the bloody Sunday papers.....

Susan Jacoby

Quire clearly, the readers of The Spectator online are a perceptive lot. Indeed, I did not say that reading online isn't really reading--only that most people who "read" online are looking for isolated bits of information, not for an entire article, not to mention a book.

What I say in my book (and it is only a small part of my book) is that most people who go online do not go there to "read," in the traditional sense of taking in anything from a piece of political commentary to a book, but to swoop down like vultures on bits of info. There's nothing wrong with doing this at all, but there is something wrong with confusing the info-seeking we all do on the internet with, say, reading "Paradise Lost." I can't prove it, I acknowledge, but I daresay that most people who read great works of literature don't do it on the Web. The Web is designed to encourage a short attention span through links, and that's wonderful for a journalist or anyone else who wants to acquire information with the attention span of a gnat, but it has nothing to do with real knowledge of any kind.

Graham Barton

Some of the comments below reinforce the author's proposition that web users don't read properly. Only one or two paragraphs consider the idea that reading on the web isn't reading. The main thrust of the article is that folks are not reading very much at all and the skill is not being learned because of other distractions. This leads to ignorance of world affairs and a general intellectual vaccuum. I agree, and for the sake of my 4 young ones, got rid of the tele 6 years ago.

web design

The irony (maybe not irony...but its something) being that we are reading her article on the web...