The psychological delights are intellectually stultifying. For education to happen, people must encounter worthwhile things outside their sphere of interest and brainpower. Knowledge grows, skills improve, tastes refine, and conscience ripens only if the experiences bear a degree of unfamiliarity—a beautiful artwork you are forced to inspect even though it leaves you cold; an ancient city you have to detail even though history puts you to sleep; a microeconomic problem you have to solve even though you fumble with arithmetic. To take them in, to assimilate the objects intelligently, the intellectual tool kit must expand and attitudes must soften. If the first apprehension stalls, you can’t mutter, “I don’t get it—this isn’t for me.” You have to say, “I don’t get it, and maybe that’s
my
fault.” You have to accept the sting of relinquishing a cherished notion, of admitting a defect in yourself. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s simple admonition should be the rule: “You must change your life.”
Nobody savors the process, but mature adults realize the benefits. Adolescents don’t, and digital connections save them the labor of self-improvement. These connections answer to concerns of young users, and in each application they reinforce an existing sensibility. The screen and the cell bombard adolescents with youth trifles, and the sporadic brush with challenging objects that recall their shortcomings is quickly offset by a few minutes back in virtual comfort zones. The opportunity costs are high, for what might happen if they converted half the hours at the screen to reading essays, conjugating foreign verbs, supporting a local politician, or disassembling an old computer? Three years might pass and they would stand well above their peers in knowledge and skills, but the adolescent doesn’t think that far ahead. With the screen offerings, the intellectual barriers are low and the rewards immediate.
This is precisely why young adults claim technology as their own, and why we should reconsider the basic premise of digital learning: that leisure time in front of screens forms an educational progress. Not reject the premise, but examine it again, slow it down, set it in light not only of the promise of technology, and its inevitability, but in light of a demonstrable and all-too-frequent outcome. For most rising users, screen time doesn’t graduate them into higher knowledge /skill states. It superpowers their social impulses, but it blocks intellectual gains.
With poor results in evidence, we should reassess the novel literacies hailed by techno-cheerleaders and their academic backers, compare them to the old ones in terms of their effects, and determine whether the abilities acquired in game spaces and Read/Write Web sites transfer to academic and workplace requirements. Too many assumptions pass unexamined. The Federation of American Scientists report on video games cited earlier maintains, “The success of complex video games demonstrates [that] games can teach higher-order thinking skills such as strategic thinking, interpretative analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change . . . the skills U.S. employers increasingly seek in workers and new workforce entrants.” But for all the popularity of games among teens and the faith among experts that they instill “higher-order thinking skills,” U.S. employers complain relentlessly about “lower-order” thinking skills, the poor verbal and numerical competencies of incoming workers. The Federation report itself notes that only some games prove beneficial (“educational games”) and that they affect only “some aspects of learning.” “Strategic thinking” and “interpretative analysis” sound like advanced cognitive talents, but do games help students read and multiply better than traditional methods do?
Many leading education researchers, assuming that the information economy commands that learning be digitalized, nonetheless press forward without judging the quality of the outcomes. As Donald Leu, endowed professor of literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut and former president of the National Reading Conference, put it in 2000:
If it is already clear that the workplace and higher education have become dependent upon such technologies, why do we require efficacy studies in school classrooms? Research time might be better spent on exploring issues of how to support teachers’ efforts to unlock the potentials of new technologies, and not on demonstrating the learning gains from technologies we already know will be important to our children’s success.
The sense of inevitability—technology’s here to stay, so we might as well go with it—prompts researchers to accept the practices technology fosters, to tolerate and respect the habits young people develop as a serious and catholic literacy. One article from 2002 in
The Reading Teacher,
a major journal in the field, nicely exemplifies that approach. The author, a communications professor in Australia, observes and interviews students in classrooms reading and writing on screens, then outlines in bullet points the mental broadening that Web reading produces:
• permits nonlinear strategies of thinking;
• allows nonhierarchical strategies;
• offers nonsequential strategies;
• requires visual literacy skills to understand multimedia components;
• is interactive, with the reader able to add, change, or move text; and
• enables a blurring of the relationship between reader and writer. (See Sutherland-Smith.)
We might inquire whether the hasty browsing through Google-searched Web sites, the adolescent repartee of teen blogs, and the composition of
MySpace
profiles really amount to “strategies of thinking. ” And we might wonder whether visual elements in the multimedia environment highlight or obscure the print elements, which is to say, whether acute visual literacies might or might not interfere with verbal literacy. Not here, though. The author casts Web reading as a supplement to book reading, not a better or worse medium, just a different one, and so she interprets the Web as a mind-expanding forum. “The Internet provides opportunities to extend thinking skills beyond the hierarchical, linear-sequential model that serves so well in the world of print text,” she concludes.
Recent trends in reading habits among teens and young adults, though, alter the relationship. Screen reading isn’t a supplement anymore, is no longer an “extension” of thinking skills beyond the “linear-sequential model.” It’s the primary activity, and the cultivation of nonlinear, nonhierarchical, nonsequential thought patterns through Web reading now transpires on top of a thin and cracking foundation of print reading. For the linear, hierarchical, sequential thinking solicited by books has a shaky hold on the youthful mind, and as teens and young adults read linear texts in a linear fashion less and less, the less they engage in sustained linear thinking. Nonlinear, nonhierarchical thinking sounds creative and individualized, but once the Web dominates a student’s intellectual sphere, does it change value, sliding into a destructive temptation to eschew more disciplined courses of thinking, to avoid reading a long poem line by line, tracking a logical argument point by point, assembling a narrative event by event . . . ? The other effects, too, might prove harmful. If students grow up thinking that texts are for interactivity—to add, to delete, to cut and paste—do they acquire the patience to assimilate complex texts on their own terms, to read
The Iliad
without assuming that the epic exists to serve their purposes? If the Web blurs the reader-writer relationship, what happens to a Web-saturated young adult when he enters a workplace that sets limits on a writer’s identity and opinions and needs, for instance, in journalism?
Those questions don’t crop up in establishment academic inquiry, and they certainly don’t preoccupy the digital-learning advocates. There is, however, an instructive ongoing research project far from the education sector that does address the nature and effectiveness of screen habits and Web reading in ways that bear directly upon the youth-screen interface. Nielsen Norman Group is a consulting firm headquartered in Fremont, California, led by Jakob Nielsen, a former Sun Microsystems engineer, and Don Norman, a cognitive scientist with distinguished service in academic and private research, including tenure as vice president of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer. 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 that enjoy 11 million page views per year, according to the company Web site.
Ten years ago, the
New York Times
termed Nielsen “the guru of Web page ‘usability’ ” and identified the core aim of the firm: to make Web pages easier to use and read and trust. That’s the service Nielsen Norman offers its clients from General Motors to Merck to the Getty Museum to the U.S. Navy—a better Web site, better graphics, and better text. Nielsen has no stake in grand pronouncements about the Digital Age, and no speculations about “new literacies” or “digital natives” or “learning styles” surface in his reports. Instead, he bestows concrete, evidence-based recommendations regarding site design, for instance, how to make on-screen text more inviting, how to craft effective banners and headings, how to keep recipients from deleting messages and e-newsletters, and how to balance visual and verbal formats. Nielsen doesn’t emphasize the creativity of Web design experts or the characteristics of products for sale or items to peruse on the site. He consults a more mundane factor, the habits and reactions of regular users in their routine usage, customers the Web site hopes to attract and hold.
That means Nielsen Norman must devise testing sessions with ordinary subjects, observing how they “see” different pages, move from site to site, and register images, prose, color, headlines, layout, and font. In the standard setup, people sit before a screen and testers ask them to visit certain sites and perform certain functions, then encourage them to explore the site as they wish and to voice immediate impressions of the things they encounter. Testers go silent while users think out loud as they navigate and read. “Don’t like the color,” “Borrrrrrring,” “Too much stuff,” “I’m stopping here,” they mutter, and the observers record them faithfully. The procedure monitors more than opinions, too. Because, Nielsen insists, “you have to watch users
do
things,” the trials include an eyetracking component, a technique that detects eye movements and charts where on the Web page vision moves and rests, and for how long.
Fifteen years of tests, analyses, retests, reports, and consultations have crystallized into an unexpected but persuasive model of Web users and Web page usability. It begins with accounts of how people actually read a page on the screen. Using the eyetracker in successive studies from the early 1990s through 2006, Nielsen has reached a set of conclusions regarding how users take in text as they go online and browse, and they demonstrate that screen reading differs greatly from book reading. In 1997, he issued an alert entitled “How Users Read on the Web.” The first sentence ran, “They
don’t
” (emphasis here and in later citations original). Only 16 percent of the subjects read text on various pages linearly, word by word and sentence by sentence. The rest scanned the pages, “picking out individual words and sentences,” processing them out of sequence. The eyetracker showed users jumping around, fixating on pieces that interest them and passing over the rest. This is what the screen encourages users to do, Nielsen observes. The Web network goads users to move swiftly through one page and laterally to another if nothing catches their eye. Web designers who assume that visitors, even motivated ones, read their prose as it is written misconstrue their audience.
A similar study of Web reading came out of Nielsen’s “Alertbox” in April 2006 with the title “F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content. ” Here the eyetracker picked up a curious movement in user scanning. “F for
fast,
” it opened. “That’s how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.” The pattern looks like the capital letter F. At the top of the page, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal movement shortens, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom of the page, the eyes move almost vertically, forming the lower stem of the F shape. The pattern varied somewhat with each of the 232 user-subjects, but the overall trajectory from wide-to-narrow as the eyes slid from top to bottom held steady. Whatever content businesses want to communicate to visitors better not be concentrated in the lower-right portions of the screen, Nielsen advised.
In between those two studies, Nielsen reported the findings of another, more specialized eyetracking project conducted by the Poynter Institute in 2000. Poynter concentrated on newspaper sites and selected subjects who gathered news online at least three times a week. The exercises the 67 participants completed in the test, therefore, largely replicated their normal reading habits at home. Two tendencies of online newsreaders, it became clear, revealed salient features of screen reading. One, users preferred news briefs to full articles by a factor of three to one. As Nielsen generalized, even in news environments “the most common behavior is to hunt for information and be ruthless in ignoring details.” Furthermore, the eyetracker revealed, on those occasions when users read the full article, they “saw” only about 75 percent of the complete text. Two, urged to go online just as they do normally, users in the Poynter study frequently engaged in “interlaced browsing,” that is, opening several windows and hopping back and forth, reading a bit on one site, then a bit on another, then returning for more to the original, then opening a new window, etc. Nielsen’s inference: “Users are not focused on any one single site.” They like to move around, and they want what they read on one site to gel with the text on the others. They regard the Web not as a collection of discrete sites with high walls and idiosyncratic characteristics, but as a network of related sites with enough similarities to make cross-reading run smoothly.