Probably the biggest change is going to come from the changed definition of what we’re reading. More and more, texts will evolve the way Wikipedia entries evolve; the idea of a finished text, where all the words have been locked down, will start to seem a little less orthodox—something you’d expect from a novel, but not from a magazine article, say. And that open-endedness will likely mean that the reader is capable of participating, adding links, commenting, suggesting new avenues for exploration, fact-checking. So we’ll have to read in an even more focused way, I suspect, knowing that we can have a say in where the text eventually goes. So there you go: ebooks and digital text are keeping us from skimming and forcing us to engage with the text more directly. Who would have thought it?
Skilled readers rely on their brain’s ‘visual dictionary’ to recognize words
Via Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future
Skilled readers can recognize words at lightning fast speed when they read because the word has been placed in a visual dictionary of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) neuroscientists.
Via medicalxpress.com
To be sure, some people are never going to be readers. We used to feel sorry for them. Now it’s the norm. With the extreme right, it’s a point of pride. Don’t need no book-learnin’ when Rush and Sean and Bill will tell you the truth. There’s Bible-verse flash cards for knowin’ God’s plan, which is to vote Rick Perry. And the “well read” get their “news” from Web sites and tracts that toe a line of partisan half-truths and superstitions. Here we need a Truman Capote to provide the equivalent putdown of “that’s not writing, that’s typing.” No wonder William F. Buckley, who spent his life trying to create an intellectual American conservatism to counter the marginal no-nothingism of reaction died disillusioned. How a nation with a majority of simpletons faces the most complex dangers in history will be tragedy and farce. I just wish we didn’t have to live through it, too.
There’s only so much you can devote in any one day to reading. But you must read. That’s why I feel I must read the newspapers first. Why? Because I really want to know what is going on. But I don’t have more than one main paper that I can rely upon, and that is The Times. That is the paper of record and the paper of significance. It does the best job of any paper in the whole world of covering the world.
