WE ARE NOW PEOPLE OF THE SCREEN

In the article Reading in a Whole New Way Kevin Kelly worries that devices like Apple's iPad nurtures action over contemplation. Funny, because I am reading his article on my iPad..;) In ancient times, authors often dictated their books. Dictation sounded like an uninterrupted series of letters, so scribes wrote down the letters in one long continuous string, likeforexamplehere. Text was written without spaces between words until the 11th century. This continuous script made books hard to read, so only a few people were accomplished at reading them aloud to others. Being able to read silently to yourself was considered AN AMAZING TALENT. Writing was an even rarer of amazing talents at that time. In 15th-century Europe only one in 20 adult MALES could write. Crazy to think that women did not have a right to read at all. Over time, by 1910 three-quarters of the towns in America with more than 2,500 residents had a public library. WE became a people of the book! 

    I do not know if I should say "sadly", but we are now people of the screen. The amount of time people spend reading has almost tripled since 1980. Screens became a big part of our lives. I never thought that we read more than people did earlier. We read text messages, emails, games, social media, and web stories. Reading becomes almost athletic. I never thought about this way, but now I do.

Screens provoke action instead of persuasion. Propaganda is less effective in a world of screens, because while misinformation travels fast, corrections do, too!

    Our screens watching us everyday. They are our mirrors, the wells into which we look to find out about ourselves. Not to see our face, but our status. Already millions of people use their phones to input their location, what they eat, how much they weigh, their mood, their sleep patterns and what they see. The phone has become a part of our identity! 

Bookstore that you should check out<3

    Thanks to technology, we're reading more than ever-our brains process thousands of words via text messages, email, games, social media, and web stories. In the article Everything Science Knows About Reading On Screens Annie Sneed worries that if we've adapted our reading habits to fit our screens, but at what cost. Many researchers say that reading onscreen encourages a particular style of reading called "nonlinear" reading-basically, skimming. But this style of reading may come at a cost. Research scientist Zimming Liu noted in his study, that sustained attention seems to decline when people read onscreen rather than on paper, and that people also spend less time on in-depth reading. Another study by Rakefet Ackerman Technion-Israel Institute of Technology also supports the idea that paper is sometimes less distracting than our screens. 

    But what about e-books? We don't have to fight for out attention with a Kindle-they're close to a traditional paperback as technology offers, with a similar layout and image quality that rivals physical books. The researchers found almost no significant differences between the paper books and Kindles, save one: people who read on paper were much better at reconstructing the plot of the story. Another thing is that you can tell from a book that you're reading a 500-page novel or a 10-page poem, but you can't tell that from a Kindle or an iPad. Also, you can't physically see how much of the e-book you've read, and you don't have the tactile experience of turning the pages, and all this makes it much harder to create a mental map of the text. 

    Screens will be the first place we'll look for answers, for friends, for news, for meaning, for our sense of who we are and who we can be. SO, FORGET YOUR SMARTPHONE AND COMPUTER, SIT DOWN, AND READ A BOOK!