I undoubtedly feel the symptoms (or benefits) of Sarah Perez’s assertions about Gen Y – there is no mistaking that this is my generation. When I read her paragraph about skimming even the shortest blog entries, I had already skipped a few paragraphs. She caught me!
Regarding Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid?: I feel that my very superficial speed reading training lends some credibility to what Carr says is happening to the way we read and think. The central tenet to most speed reading programs argues against “deep reading” in favor of rapid skimming. The argument, which was first made by Evelyn Wood in the 50′s, states that the brain absorbs more information than we think it does and thus we need our hand to keep our pace up. While this form is “disengaged,” as Carr puts it, it is nevertheless a valid form of absorbing reading. Instead of our hand to keep pace, we have only the speed of a mouse click.
But therein lies a potential problem in online reading. One cannot simply scroll through articles as fast as possible – one needs to pace one’s self and work up to higher and higher speeds. Not only this, but we can and must use the customizability of the internet to suit our rapid reading needs, concerning ourselves with such seeming minutiae as column width and color. But perhaps even these are just vestiges of our dead-trees-as-text past, further boundaries to be transcended by Gen Z.
my experiences with speed reading have been similar. i do think that you can better process information than you think you can (w/o subvocalization and using your hand to move your eyes quickly over the material) and pushing the boundaries of that and getting more done is always good.
looking over a webpage however can be a lot more tedious and take time to work up to higher speeds.
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