Strategically Communicating

I must say I was very relieved that we were assigned to read a book for our homework! If the 10-year-old me were here today, she would be astonished. As a child, I dreaded being assigned a book for homework. I got bored and distracted easily when I tried to read books as a child. As I grew up, I found myself much happier in the visually stimulating world of the Internet. Today however, I am much more distracted than I ever was. I can’t focus when reading online and I would much rather read a book for a homework assignment than suffer through an online article.

I have never had the patience or acute attention to read a book for a long period of time, so why was I so eager to try reading a book again? As Carr points out, we don’t really share a relationship with the computer screen, like we do with a printed book. “The bond between the book reader and the book writer has always been a tightly symbiotic one, a means of intellectual and artistic fertilization” (Carr, 74). For me, it has always been harder to absorb material from an online article than a printed article.

In “The Shallows,” Steve Johnson worries that the immersion into the ideas of the author in books will be compromised.

With reading occurring more and more on the Internet, are the ways in which we read print books changing as well?