So you think you read a lot online?

There was Emperor Yong Zheng of the Qing Dynasty, a very hard-working and dedicated Manchu ruler. He read documents and submissions from and by officials with such vigor, he is said to consume an estimate of 30,000 words per day. That's quite voluminous, even by modern standards.

Today, words and literature are gradually moving onto screens, thanks to the Web. Academic coursework are uploaded by universities and students are expected to download them there. The efficacy of technology tools prove to be an impetus for students to complete their work on-line and on-screen. Newspapers are seeing it fit to introduce their papers via the Web, perhaps sensing the trend in readers, thereby the mushroom of various news portals. It is therefore a truism to say that modern folks obtain a large percentage of information from the Web.

In developed countries, much has been allocated to the digitalisation of education, bringing screens and the Internet into classroom. Induction of technology and the Web thus begin at an early age for the average modern kid. A person reading from paperback and hard-cover books is a rare sight in today's modern context. Instead, screens are everywhere, be it games or books, absorbing the user's attention wholly.

Usually, when it comes to technology, the general attitude is very enthusiastic to see that they succeed and replace more traditional methods of doing things. Be it everyday chores or academic work, technology is heralded as the future. Technology's proponents enthuse about the many benefits, and the facilitation of everyday tasks. Where learning is concerned, the same could be said of such attitudes.

There are always and inevitably two sides to a coin. Would technology be an exception? Unlikely, as it is also a fallible creation by fallible men. What are the ill effects, if any? They should be of a grave nature, seeing as reading is one of the primary ways to improving the human mind.

I was rather disturbed to learn of a research saying how on-line reading is costing us intellectually and cognitively. It's called the Nielsen research. Nielsen is a consulting firm. Quote: "for several years, Nielsen Norman has executed controlled testing of Web experiences, analyzed the consumer aspect of new technologies, questioned the prevailing wisdom of Web design, and issued regular industry 'alerts' on the findings..." 

Nielsen Norman offers to help companies make their Web pages easier to use and read and trust. In other words, they seek to make pages more accessible to surfers, and in order to do that they must adapt to the reading habits and patterns of these people. They have conducted many sessions to discover such things from customers, and one of them which attracted my attention was their eyetracking trial, a technique that detects eye movements and charts where on the Web page vision moves and rests, and for how long.

In Nielsen's 1997 alert, "How Users Read on the Web", the first sentence ran, "They don't". It was found that only 16% read text linearly, word by word and sentence by sentence. The rest of them scan pages and pages. The eyetracker found eye movements to be swift when there is nothing to interest.

The research revealed two tendencies of online newsreaders. It is already rare for young folks to read the news, yet the findings are somewhat disappointing as I relate them to myself:

• users preferred news briefs to full articles by a factor of three to one. Nielsen generalised, "even in news environments, the most common behaviour is to hunt for information and be ruthless in ignoring details." The eyetracker also discovered that when people do read the full text, they only saw about 75% of the complete text. 
• users frequently engaged in "interlaced browsing". It means opening several windows and hopping back and forth, most probably to check that one notification, reading a bit on one site and then a bit on another before retuning for more to the original, then opening a new window. This means that users try to find content which are similar to make cross-reading run smoothly, and when they fail, they terminate that page and move on. This also means less bigger words and much shallow content.

There are more to the research. The two points were, however, enough to trouble me. Does it mean that online or on-screen reading equals to less and poorer quality of reading? Yet the screen does provide much convenience.

The only solution seems to remind oneself as the daily surfing and browsing and reading go on. Still, it is unlikely for the reminder to stay put as time creeps by...

Or people should just go back to books? For kids at least?