Do we need a new word for reading on screen?
Bill Hill at The Future of Reading doesn’t think we need a new word for reading on screen. I happen to agree, but I think the question itself is somewhat benign.
If reading on screen and reading on paper are different, then they should be distinguished as such. It would be confusing to have any kind of meaningful discussion about their differences if we can’t talk about them as different things. As reading on paper and reading on screen can be the same (cognitively speaking) in some instances, we probably don’t need a different word to distinguish them on that basis.
But, as I touched on here, there are different kinds of reading (I describe three axes, long/short, fiction/non-fiction, and high/low reader input), they just aren’t necessarily characterised by whether the glyphs appear on pixels or on paper.
So, Hill is correct in that we don’t need a new word for reading on screen, but we can’t stop there. We need to distinguish between different kinds of reading, and then use these fundamental differences to help us create correspondingly different editorial and publishing technologies. Paper versus pixels is a crude (and sometimes false) dichotomy, and thinking about reading in those terms won’t get us anywhere.
