Simon Dikker Hupkes Student number: 1092847 Universiteit Leiden
Book and Digital Media Studies MA Thesis
First reader: Prof. dr. Adriaan van der Weel Second reader: Corina Koolen, M.A.
Completed June, 2012
Digital academia
The decline of the monograph, the rise of digital in academic publishing and the consequences for academic culture
Table of contents
Introduction 3
Why is political science relevant? 5
A note on publications 6
Plan of this thesis 6
1. Definitions 8
Academic culture and practice 8
Medium and modality 8
Print and digital text 9
Long-form and lexia 9
Internet: three ways of using it 10 2. The medium and the message: a short overview 13
The Homeric question 13
Orality and literacy 14
Crisis in orality 15
Gutenberg and the print revolution 16
The medium is the message 16
Computer and the brain 17
From Havelock to Carr 19
3. Continuities and change in academic publishing 22 History of the internet and academics 22
Why are academics relevant? 23
The practice of academic publishing 26
Methodology of the case study 27
Findings 28
Ph.D. candidates’ experiences with the internet 30
4. The changing library 32
Libraries and students 32
Double-F reading and creating meaning 33
Financial pressures on the library 35
Serendipity in the library 36
Paper journals and Google Scholar 37
5. Discussion 40
Sources: searching 40
Sources: articles over books 42
A vicious circle 45
Style 46
Books in elementary and high school 47
Academic culture 49
Conclusion 51
Introduction
In this day and age, when the demise of the book is constantly being predicted and tablets are heralded as the new schoolbooks for our young people, one wonders about the developments in the academic world in this respect. Serious study has always been among the first reasons to produce a text, copied in manuscripts and later books. Academics1 and their predecessors have always been among the first consumers and producers of what is now often referred to as “content”.
That there is a relationship between a medium, its contents and also the social and intellectual effects it has on the person that is using a medium, no one would deny. The debate lies in how to define these relations. It is also safe to say that there are feedback loops in these relations. For example, the amount of time spent on the internet2 affects the ability of a person to read books (both in that there are only 24 hours to a day as well as being used to a connected screen versus an insulated book).
Disseminating knowledge produced in academic institutions is almost always done through a written publication. Print was the dominant form for a long time: after Gutenberg’s “invention” of the printing press and the industry that sprang from it, the manuscript culture of monasteries and professional scribes vanished. It is not a new observation that today we stand on the watershed of an altogether new era in the history of textual transmission, different from the one that went from manuscript to print but similar in the ways that it will alter the scope and means, and the contents -
what we think, as well.
In a world where content is now a commodity, where we rely more and more on algorithms and ICT to process data, academics no longer have the authority as a
matter of course over their fields. They are forced to defend their role in society and account for the funding they receive. Doing this online seems to be logical, since this makes for an easy connection to the general public. Academics have gone to the internet just as much as anyone else.
1“Academic”, “scholar” and “scientist” and their respective adjectives are used interchangeably in this
thesis. Also, “he” should be read as “he or she”.
The flow of information between people and people and between people and organizations is more and more processed digitally. Checking e-mail or the latest updates on one’s favorite website is often the first thing in the morning and the last at night. Setting up a get-together with friends, paying the bills or getting the latest news is done on the screen.
How and how often we interact with the screen, almost always online, has affected the way we experience this. It has become normal. But in the process, it has affected the way we experience other, older modes of communication or transmission as well. Who listens to radio? Who writes a letter? Who finds the urge to read a book, or actually does it?
Gradually, we have changed a lot of our habits – surrendered them to the screen or smart phone. And we did so for a reason: things can be handled more efficiently. With my iPhone I can always go online, with Twitter I don’t miss a thing of the latest news, so why watch the evening news? I know what my friends are doing, so why call them? Texting or whatsapping is to be preferred.
Wikipedia has the answer to almost any factual question, so why spend money on a paper encyclopedia that doesn’t update itself? I can instantly check if I like the new Wilco album, so why would I go to the record store to check it out? I almost always play my music through the computer, so a CD or vinyl would only be a hassle – plus it costs money. But it’s not about human interest. In this thesis, we look at the influence internet has on the academic practice and academic culture.
When I use the term internet, I want to look at it in the broadest possible way. In assessing its influence on academic culture, I want to look at the way that academics’ work ends up on the internet in digital form and how the internet as a source to find the data they need is used. Also, the more day-to-day use of the internet, such as e-mail, social media, the mere fact and experience of having a screen that is connected to vast amounts of information in front of one’s nose – all those experiences that are not specific to the environment of an academic researcher, but have become a fact of life to us all, are taken into account.
I look specifically at the experiences of academics working in the field of political science (a defense of this discipline will follow), but I do hope that my findings
and models will create an outcome that is relevant to the academic practice as a whole as well. Just as these findings will say something about a question that has been hotly debated in the public domain recently: Is the internet, in the end, making us smarter or dumber?
Whether it is for entertainment purposes or for use as educational tool or intellectual satisfaction, what we see is that the printed book as the preferred medium is giving way to the internet. The outcome of this process will definitely have
consequences on our culture.
What this thesis does is zooming in on this process at a specific place in our culture, namely the academic institution and what goes on there. How are books used and how are online sources used? What effect does this have on academic culture as a whole? Within academic culture, I then further zoom in on the specific academic culture of political science. Another way of looking at my thesis is viewing it as a piece on the relation between internet and academics, with a case study on political science.
Why is political science relevant?
Since the topic at hand is very broad in itself, it makes no sense to look at academic culture as such. That would make this thesis too demanding. Practically, I have a degree in political science, so I am familiar with the journals and the topics researched. I have chosen for the discipline of political science as object of this study.
Political science as a discipline sits nicely on the border between social science and humanities (SSH) and the more exact sciences or scientific, technical and medical
studies (STM). It ranges from theoretical and historical tractates to more statistical
research on election research data based on election outcomes and surveys. As such, political science on the blogs, bulletin boards and university repositories combines the exchange of databases and statistical models as one would expect to see happen in the exact sciences with long-form articles that represent arguments in a similar fashion as in the humanities. It is this diversity within the discipline that causes some universities to offer political science as an MA programme, while others treat it as an MSc. Evidently, this broad range makes it representative and significant as an object of study for this
subject. My findings will possibly be extrapolated to academic culture as a whole, in all humility of course.
Within the sciences, my findings will be extrapolated more easily to the other social sciences and the humanities than to the exact sciences. The reason for this is that humanities and social sciences always make their argument (eventually) aided by a narrative and a narrative requires linear text. Data always have to be contextualized within these fields, whereas in the natural sciences the most important laws can, in the end, be brought back to formulas. They will therefore suffer less from the hypothetical loss of linear and long-form.3
A note on publishing
When looking at academic research and academic culture, publications as end product of this process play an important role. Since this is a thesis in Book and Digital Media Studies and not in philosophy of science, I focus on the publication (regardless what form) and the use of those publications and not on teaching, conferences, research methods or other features of the academic process. All these other topics, especially teaching, will surface eventually, but they are not central to my question.
Also, this thesis doesn’t take a neutral stance on the book. It views the book as a medium that is a vital symbol and object both in academia as well as in our (western) culture. To state that the medium doesn’t matter, as long as its contents are spread and reach the end user, is to miss McLuhan’s most important point. ‘Indeed, it is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.’4 This thesis is about the mediums first and contents second.
Plan of this thesis
Key concepts are defined in the next chapter. In chapter two, I want to go into the relation between a medium and a message in a broader sense. This is useful for several reasons. First, in sketching a framework of thinking about these things I can make
3 Also, my understanding of the natural sciences and of its discipline is just not sufficient enough to make statements about it.
4McLuhan, M. Understanding Media, the Extensions of Man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1964,
clearer the relevance and legitimacy of my topic within Book and Digital Media Studies. Second, it provides the reader with a historical frame of reference in looking at
mediums. It lets us think about the concept of digitization of our lives and texts. Chapter three explains how academic publishing works, elaborates on why academic culture matters for the wider debate about the consequences of this
dominance of the internet. It also provides a case study on publications within political science, to see if online sources are indeed used more than before. Chapter four
discusses the changing role of books within academia, the rise of the article and the digitization of the academic workplace. The monograph is in decline and books are used less in academic research. I discuss the consequences of these developments and will try to offer a way of thinking about these issues in the future in chapter five.
When I started doing research for this thesis, I expected there to be a lively blogosphere of Ph.D. students, but apart from exceptions, this was not the case. This thesis then gradually evolved into both an (1) account of digitization within science and how the digital environment as a new starting place has led to a situation where digital comes before print and the journal article is more prominent than the book, and (2) a narrative on how books might be lost for future scholars if the trend continues, why this is not desirable and why it is justified to pay attention to this issue.
Chapter one and three are necessary to set the terms and introduce the most important concepts. Chapter two is my historical account of the insights the field of Book and Digital Media Studies has to offer in thinking about the properties of a medium. Chapter four and five eventually contain most of the arguments on what is happening in the library and what should be happening. I hope that even for readers who don’t agree with my final points, this thesis proves to be helpful in that it provides a framework on the digital in academia.
1. Definitions
Academic culture and practice
Although many of the terms I use are familiar, for the sake of clarity it is useful to borrow definitions of other authors or explain in what way some concepts will be used within this thesis.
I talk of academic culture and practice. By academic practice I mean what academics do. Nowadays, the computer is much more common within this practice than thirty years ago. Needless to say, academic practice refers to their doings within the academic realm. If a scholar goes to the gym, it is irrelevant for our purpose. Academic culture is to be understood as the total of uses, beliefs, values and norms within the academic subculture. Aspects of this are a fondness for the scientific method, courtesy and a certain matter of sophistication. How this culture changes over time defines what is expected and accepted: when scholars correct each other and praise each other.
Medium and modality
I roughly follow Van der Weel in making a distinction between a medium and a modality. A medium is, according to him, ‘a structure consisting of a technological tool with its (explicit) technical protocols and any implicit social protocols with the function to communicate information’.5 Note that this definition leaves space for mediums6 such as books which are solely to be used to read as well as a computer which can be a medium to read but is also capable of other mediations, such as playing games or watching video. The ‘implicit social protocols’ single out that every medium has its distinct character and that although different mediums can be capable of transmitting the same modality, it results in a different experience for the receiver or user.
A modality, then, is a datatype to be distributed through a medium. Van der Weel distinguishes ‘(alphanumeric) text, still images, moving images, and sound’.7 The main modality that we are concerned with in this thesis is text, and its different uses and features in print mediums and digital mediums.
5 Van der Weel, Changing our textual minds: towards a digital order of knowledge. Manchester: MUP, 2011, p. 40.
6 Van der Weel is also followed in this plural form of medium. Media is used to refer to media as we do in general speak (“news media” or “mass media”).
When speaking of a digital medium, we are mainly concerned with the
computer-in-a-network, which is mostly a computer that is connected to the internet.8 One can also think of a smart phone or e-reader, of course, as they are also endowed with the explicit technical protocols to communicate information in the form of text. As we will find out, however, these are hardly used in the process of academic reading and writing, so omitting them will not lead to different results. Apart from using “computer” or “computer-in-a-network”, I will also use the term “screen”, since it visualizes the experience of the reader better than to speak of the more abstract notion of the computer-in-a-network.9
Print and digital text
When we speak of print or digital text, we are talking about the means by which we receive it as an output. In the present, every print text (that is: the modality text in a print medium, say a book) originates in the digital realm. We will say that the same pdf-file is digital when read on the screen and print when read in a printed form. When it is read digitally, it is incapsulated within the operating system and other windows on the screen and with the abilities to have clickable text or to be the object of queries such as ctrl+F for find or search and word count or selecting and copying text. When it is read in print, other capabilities such as pencil marking arrive, but all of the above is not
possible any longer.
Long-form and lexia
We also have to distinguish between different types of texts, not as a modality, but as entities. Regardless of their output in digital or print form, we can roughly separate long-form texts and lexias. The term long-form is used for books and articles longer than one page. According to Corina Koolen long-form texts, are self-contained and
8 That means, in our day and age, almost every computer. If you take your computer to a place where there is no network to connect to, like I am doing where I write this thesis, it becomes painfully clear that modern computers are almost dependent on the internet and are not worth much without it.
9 The use of the word “screen” is partly inspired by Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg elegies. The screen also includes digital (hyper)text on a CD-rom, which is nowadays unused, but was part of the beginning of digital text and doesn’t need a network. It also includes tablet devices.
consist of several, interconnected paragraphs. The body of the text has a guiding, hierarchic structure (…) [and] can be read continuously; footnotes are seen as para-text, not as the body of the text. (..) A blog post, when self-contained and hierarchically structured, can be a long-form text.10
We can define lexias as every form of text that doesn’t fit into this category. So, a very small blog post, a tweet, a snippet from the news paper, or a table or figure from a journal article, if used as a source in research, we will refer to as a lexia. Koolen adds that a lexia is ‘an entity the reader can judge as a whole’11, whereas long-form texts can only be judged when they are used in the way they were intended, as a coherent whole set out over more than one page.
For our purpose, it is important to identify whether and how academics use and produce these two different types of text, and how they value them. A discussion of an author’s cohesion and the reader’s created coherence will follow in chapter four. In general, we can say that long-form texts tend to have cohesion as a feature of the text, whereas lexias need to be made sense of by the reader, who in turn, then, creates coherence.12
Internet: three ways of using it
The goal of this thesis is to assess the influence of the internet on academic culture, with a focus on political science. The internet is vast in both quantity and features, which means it makes sense to specify somewhat as to how this term can be used. I propose to view the internet as a(n)
Formal infrastructure to search for and download long-form texts and lexias, as well as submitting texts and data to that infrastructure;
Informal infrastructure to search information;
non-academic infrastructure offering other information.
10 Koolen, C. Defining the ‘deferral of the interpretative burden’. Leiden: MA Thesis, Leiden University, 2010, p. 11-12.
11 Koolen, p 12. 12 Koolen, p. 17.
The internet as a formal academic infrastructure includes retrieving journal articles through the digital library, looking up titles through the library’s search portal or another search engine such as Google Scholar. But also downloading a dataset or other scholarly files belongs in this category. These features have become indispensable for academics, even if they were to eventually print out the journal article or went to the library to pick up the actual book. The internet in this sense has become the starting and tentative end point of every researcher.
The internet as an informal infrastructure amounts to a place for searching online for specific information needed for writing that is not in its essence academic or scholarly in nature but is used to this end – what used to be done through print
reference works. We can think of checking Wikipedia to see what is the capital of Nigeria, looking for a translation or synonym, checking the itinerary to arrive at a certain conference, and so on. The internet is not indispensable for doing this kind of things, but over time has proven to be very useful. This is an example of internet usage that prima facie will be of no consequence whatsoever, but since it adds to the total amount of time spent online and in front of the screen, it will be – as we are to find out in the following chapter.
As far as the non-academic infrastructure is concerned, it is the category where information not related to the present academic work is offered, either on request or through unsolicited pop-ups or advertisements. Examples would be Facebook, checking websites for news and checking personal e-mail. Another example is an advertisement that distracts you from seeing other relevant material.
We can also think of uses that don’t fit very neatly into these categories.
Checking personal e-mail would belong in the third category, but work e-mail is part of the formal infrastructure, even though it can be very time consuming and include not so relevant messages. Blog posts on academic topics, whether written by peers or ordinary people, would then belong to the second category.13 We can also make up an example of a colleague or a student seeking contact through Facebook about an academic issue. Also, more to the point, these categories are not definite and solid and my theory allows
13 It’s interesting whether they contain the properties to belong to the first category in the future, if the academic community accepts them as such. As of this writing, I have not found significant examples of this in political science, but many people expect this will happen eventually.
for instances of internet usage that incrementally will pass from one category to the other, such as scientific blogs. The point is that some of the influences of the internet we are interested in are central to the academic practice of today and others are not, but still exert their influence on the work of the scientist.
One thing about the convergence of all modalities into one medium, the
computer, is that these movements tend to go in one way only. Once a specific service or action reaches the web, it is unlikely to take the reverse route. We have seen it happen with music, dictionaries, library information, travel information, encyclopedias and home videos. All these things end up in a new environment and experience for all people living in our time. Whether you work at a university or company, since the 1980s, all offices have evolved from a paper-based office culture into a screen-based culture.14 Since then, the screen has absorbed a lot of activities that have proven to be very handy on a computer.
How being online and on a computer all the time is affecting our brains’ capacities, will be discussed in the following chapter. What we can already imagine, is that for academics, the consequences will be more important than for regular office employees, since their job is mostly not to create original output, but rather to serve as a nod in a specific process. Since we want to measure the aggregate effects of the day-to-day circumstances to academics as well, I see it fit to include this third category of the non-academic use of the internet into the research model.
2. The medium and the message: a short overview
Diving into the classics of the book studies field teaches us a lot about how the field has come to its present state, but also how the process of writing down and storing stories have influenced the human species as a whole. As we witness the next watershed, with almost all text ever created turned into online, digital, searchable text, it is useful to take notice of how our ancestors have gone through similar changes and how they were studied. Useful, first of all, since it should help us to the conclusion that a great deal of humility in assessing our current developments is appropriate.
The Homeric question
It is often said that comparative literature studies started with the Shakespearean question. The true classic of book and media studies, however, is of course the Homeric question. How could these monumental literary works have originated in all their brilliance, seemingly out of the blue? Milman Parry came up with the idea that the magnificent Iliad and Odyssey must have originated as epics that were transmitted orally through professional bards, who had the bigger storylines in their head and made use of the recurring formulations, such as epitheta ornantia, in order to fill the
hexameter lines.15 This is now a widespread known fact, but when Parry formulated it in his thesis in the 1920s it was very new.
Thus, Homer’s works are the written works of essentially oral poems or epics. The transmission of the story was dependent upon the memories of the bards. While they could store a lot more information than we can now imagine, even they would have to make use of certain techniques such as the recurring formulas. So, the bigger
storyline would be in the back of the head, and then the bard would partially improvise the poem in his recital, making use of the formulas depending on how many feet he had left in his line. (Both epics are composed in the dactylic hexameter, which means six feet of long-long-short, which results in a certain metre when performed.) We can assume that not every performance would have been the same. Also, not every time, the whole
15 See Ong, pp. 17-27 for an account of Parry’s solution to the Homeric question. Ong also states that not every account in Parry’s work is of course totally new, but that he also drawed on earlier research about Homer’s work.
Iliad would have been performed, but parts of it. Soon after the invention of the Greek
alphabet, it was written down, around 750 BC.16
Orality and literacy
To find out whether his theses were correct, Parry traveled to Yugoslavia in the 1930s, to study Balkan bards, who still knew their oral poems by heart. The phrase “by heart” in this case, should not be taken too literally, since Ong (p.21) tells us in Orality and
literacy: ‘(O)ral poets do not formally work from verbatim memorization of their verse.’
He did find an alive tradition and also found out that all bards were illiterate. Their non-ability to write, however, proved to be a prerequisite to their non-ability to recite.
Writer William Darymple finds out that the same thing had happened to Rajastani bhopas, the Indian bards. When looking for survivors in this profession in present-day India, he too finds out that the craft as handed down from father to son is dying out. He refers to Indian folklorist Kothari doing research on the oral poems on Rajasthan, when all the poems were to be written down for preservation purposes in the 1950s. Dalrymple writes: ‘But soon Kothari noticed that Lakha (a singer who had learned to read and write for this purpose – SDH) needed to consult his diary before he began to sing, while the rest of the Langa singers were able to remember hundreds of songs – an ability that Lakha somehow begun to lose as he slowly learned to write.’17 What had been repeated over centuries to be stored was now being written down. Once written down it was stored in a new way and gradually the oral repetition lost its necessity and thus disappeared eventually. And in this process we have made the transition from orality to literacy. In The Muse learns to write Eric Havelock develops a theory about the consequences of this turn to literacy. Where the first written “literary” works were oral poems written down, later works were written down that carried quite a different tone, which was dependent on the very act of writing itself.
16 Some researchers argue that it must have been a team of writers instead of one person, or that Homer was illiterate, or that the Iliad and Odyssey did not have the same author, but we’ll leave that matter for now and focus on the relation between storing text, the tools we use to this end and their social and psychological consequences.
17Dalrymple, W. Nine lives: in search of the sacred in modern India. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009,
Crisis in orality
The nature and tone of an oral delivery will be conveniently shaped in a narrative form, one that ties the audience to the story. To keep the audience’s attention, and to perform its social function of embodying values, it is thus centered around characters that fail (tragically) or succeed (heroically) in certain actions. Underlying is the moral of the story. Havelock states that the result is ‘on the one hand a language of specialists, yet on the other hand a language in which all to a varying degree participate’,18 since the audience would have to be able to understand the message. Writing from scratch, and not writing down already present poems, freed the writer from the poetic constraint of metre and from its audience. It became writing for and by people who could read and write.
The introduction of the Greek alphabet, according to Havelock, had such social and intellectual consequences, that he speaks of a crisis point. Gradually and over the course of two centuries composers changed the subjects of persons and actions to abstractions and principles, since the brain had space for other processes: ‘As the memory function subsided, psychic energies hitherto channeled for this purpose were released for other purposes.’19 As a result, abstract notions could be made up, presented in not a dramatic but an objective tone. Moreover, a reader could take in a text in his own time, reread parts, reply in writing. In this respect, verse gave way to prose. While Socrates only spoke, as we all know, his student Plato began to write dialogues that were already hard to believe actually taking place, thus holding middle ground between an oral setting and a literate one by transmitting very literate thoughts. When his student Aristotle, in his turn, wrote, the dramatic narrative had already disappeared.
What are we to take with us of this history for our present purpose? Not that orality itself disappeared, but only what Havelock calls “primary orality”. With the process of the introduction of writing as a technology, orality did not disappear
overnight, but more to the point, evolved over two centuries. What results is a space for orality, but not in its original function as the key mode of governing and transmitting social norms. It also shows us the difference between pre-literate and illiterate. The
18 Havelock, p. 77. 19 Havelock, p. 101.
illiterate knows of writing and its corresponding different idiom, but the pre-literate lives in a different society that hasn’t yet experienced the literate turn of classical Greece.20 We as literates therefore, also relying mostly on written texts, are almost incapable of understanding such an oral society. Precisely because our minds have changed as a consequence, we should to try to think about what other, be it less radical, changes in the technology of storing and transmitting knowledge will mean, if we look at today’s situation.
Gutenberg and the print revolution
When Gutenberg combined the necessary components to invent printing as we know it, he helped to make available texts that were preserved through hand copying for two millennia as well as disseminate current ideas of people like Luther. The Reformation called upon and made use of the new possibility to study texts, previously something only an academic elite was capable of. Printing also led to an increasing number of works in the vernacular languages of different European countries.
The medium is the message
Let’s turn back now from social impacts of new technologies of reading and writing to individual mental changes, comparable to the Greek experience of using the very act of writing to phrase different questions altogether.
Marshall McLuhan is famous for saying that the “medium is the message”. He acknowledged that we don’t have as much control over our technologies as we like to think we have and that we often only stare at the contents of the medium, but rarely take the time to think about the character of the medium. This thesis argues that there is a constant back-and-forth between the preservation tool, the writer and the society in which all this takes place over time. The feedback or impact technologies have on us as human beings shape what we leave behind for future generations – and with ever newer technologies, this process never ends. But because this process is only secondary to the outcomes (the contents) it is hard for us to look at the process itself.
20 Havelock considers the invention of other alphabets that originated before the Greek one, but those don’t apply to his five criteria of the special theory of Greek orality on pp. 86-87.
Someone who made critical thought the goal of his life, Friedrich Nietzsche, is famously quoted in Nicholas Carr’s important book The shallows, by admitting that his new tool the typewriter had actually changed the tone of his prose to shorter axioms. In a letter to a friend he writes: ‘You are right, our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.’21
What we have today as a typewriter, the personal computer, is now not only the tool we use to write, but also to read. As if this were not enough, we can use the
computer for nearly everything that we previously had other, specific mediums for. Considering all the above, we should expect that this new environment and tool will shape our society and will shape our intellectual capabilities and directions as well.
Computer and the brain
The workings of the human brain have become a very popular research field over the last decade. The combining of new research into what is happening in the brain with regard to topics such as religion, love, free will and criminality have led to new ways of explaining these human experiences. To some degree, this form of science has further “demystified” the human experience. People who believe in this way of thinking have made the brain a determinant for everything. Love is an overdose of dopamine; a depression is caused by too much or too little serotonin reuptake which can be fixed by a reuptake inhibitor or enhancer; Buddhist monks who meditate show enhanced activity in a specific part of their brain; drug addicts in another; etcetera etcetera.
The question remains of course, whether these discoveries just show the place where something is taking place, or whether they are also the chief determinant in that regard, in other words – whether it can also function as the total explanation for
everything a human being does or experiences. This thesis does not pursue a debate on whether a free will exists, or whether neuroscience can account for everything we do. As a person, I feel a strong urge to decline brain determinism especially for experiences like love or enjoyment of art. But we do not have the place or expertise to decide on this. It is however not necessary to take a definite stance on whether neuroscience provides
21Quoted in Carr, N. The shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains. New York, NY: W.W. Norton,
us with a causal explanation or just a description of active parts in the brain, in order to use general findings in this field for our purpose.
There is no need or time to go deeply into synapses and neurotransmitters here. What I will do is follow Carr’s explanation of neuroplasticity. It means that the brain is very plastic, and that patterns in the brain are formed through paths taken recurrently. For example, when we first learn to drive we have to be very careful with all our actions such as switching gear and handling the brake pedal. Over time, we get used to it and perceive the act as a habit. What has happened then, is that our brain has found a specific route that it will take again and again.
While it would go too far to state that the brain is a zero-sum game in its
processes, it is safe to say that everything it does has consequences for its capacity in other areas. Repetition invites repetition, known as Hebb’s rule: ‘Cells that fire together wire together.’22 Once a route between synapses is established, it will reinforce itself as a vital path. If you’re used to reading, reading a book is an enjoyable task. If you’re used to watching tv or surfing online, reading a book becomes a hassle. This is because the vital paths in our brain have become adapted to what we most do. Carr:
(…) (T)he vital paths in our brain become (…) the paths of least resistance. They are the paths that most of us will take most of the time, and the farther we proceed down them, the more difficult it becomes to turn back.23
Critics of the internet are sometimes replied to with figures about people reading more than ever. This may be true with regard to total number of characters, but it is doubtful whether it counts towards reading as we are used to understand it, since most of what is read on the web is forgotten. Again Carr (p. 122) explains that reading on the internet involves ignoring blinking banners, making the mental decision whether or not to click on each hyperlink, while at the same time deciding whether the page as a whole is worth while: maybe clicking back to search results or switching to the other tab will be time better spent. This explains why the text on web sites is not really read, but merely skimmed (more on this in chapter 4).
22 Cited in Carr, p. 27. 23 Carr, p. 35.
The paths of least resistance established in the brain also make us check our e-mail or updates on Facebook or Twitter more than we want. It almost looks as if
checking these things is not done voluntarily, but in a reflex. Companies have rules and regulations for use of e-mail for employees, since too much time is spent on e-mails. Also, it puts employees into a reactive mode rather than a pro-active one. They come into the office and turn on their e-mail client and start responding. So, their inbox becomes their to-do list. Every new message popping up needs to be looked at, replied to. It is known that although many of us do a lot of things at the same time on the computer, no one is actually able to multitask. When we are distracted, it can take five minutes or more before we are focused again on our original task.
The internet is full of distraction. And every time we are distracted, we have to regain attention. As stated in chapter 1, the consequences of this for scientists are more serious than for desk employees. Our brain adapts to this new reality. We become excellent instant deciders and decoders, but as our “working memory” expands, our long-term memory or “hard disk” becomes harder to access. So, giving meaning to texts and connecting them to our own ideas or really learning something by heart becomes a rarity.24 Unfortunately, we cannot buy extra working memory or faster processors for our brains like for our computers.25
From Havelock to Carr
With the ubiquity of the internet in a lot of aspects of our personal and academic lives, it is self-evident that these changes in our brain, and therefore, in our mind, have
consequences for our ability to think and contemplate and come up with original ideas. If we recall the change writing made possible in Greek thought, when the
“psychic energies” used for remembering formulas and storylines could be channeled to new modes as abstract thought or thinking an sich, let us pause and think what the new change will be. The “psychic energies” we used to allot to reasoning and connecting
24 See Foer, J. Moonwalking with Einstein: the art and science of remembering everything. New York, NY: 2011 for more on the interaction between brain and memory and the influence of the searchability of everything on our memories.
25 The wide acceptance of computer metaphors with regard to the brain, something of which this thesis is also guilty, should tell us something about the position computers now have in our thinking.
what we read with what we already know are now occupied with deciding whether to click a link or pay attention to a banner, or check e-mail, or watch that funny video. With web designers trying their best to keep visitors attached to their sites, with the help of personal filtering, when online, one always has the idea that he is missing out on something. This information stress and constant clicking back and forth between sites, tabs and other applications on the screen, causes our brain to focus really hard on navigating, judging and deciding and leaves less space for (deep) reading, (deep) thinking and remembering.
Through the advent of writing and reading in classical Greece, we forgot to remember and learned to think. With the rise of the internet in every aspect of our lives, are we forgetting to think and becoming masters in deciding and clicking? Are we losing the capacity to read and remembering even basic data, since they can always be looked up?
It might sound like a stupid question to some, but let us rethink. The evolution described in Greek culture, one that has left its imprint on our civilization to date, was a process of two centuries. The internet has existed for fifty years, the world wide web for twenty years and the so-called web 2.0 for only ten years. A little humility in our
judgement would do no harm. Since the general discourse on the web is one of enthusiasm and progress, I think it is justified to present a critique.26
To understand what digital reading in academia will mean, we will have to look closely and be aware of our own position. We witnessed the rise of the web and are still used to reading books, even if complaining about not reading enough has become a cliché at dinner parties. If we are surveying this topic with a print reading view, essential aspects of digital textuality and the constant presence of the screen will be missed. But a new generation that grows up without books will also use software tools, the power of numbers and new applications in a way that is natural to them and
unimaginable to us.
26 The humility demanded also applies to my own findings, of course. But I would argue that my caution of some features of the internet is humbler than the blind faith in the capacities of the web and the
Implications for the next generation are discussed in more detail at the end of chapter 4. In the next chapter, we move away from the broad debate presented here and delve more deeply into the practice of academic publishing today.
3. Continuities and change in academic publishing
In this chapter, it is defended why academic use of the internet is relevant for the bigger debate on the influence of the internet on our minds and society. Within the university, a case study on the mentioning of online sources within political science is presented. The changing nature of academic publications is introduced as a topic. We start with a short history of the relation between the internet and academics.
History of the internet and academics
One of the reasons that the internet is so fit for exchanging scientific results is because this is why it was invented. The internet as we know it, the world wide web, came into being with Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman working at CERN in Geneva, creating the protocol HTTP, markup language HTML and locator URL. He released the world wide web (www) in 1990.27
What he did was create new software that made use of the inherent capabilities that already existed with the “invention” of the internet in 1969, when ARPANET was first designed. ARPA stands for Advance Research Projects Agency of the U.S.
Department of Defense. In fact, the internet was born out of what Castells calls the unlikely formula of big science, military research and the culture of freedom. And it still bears the stamp of those origins today.
Packet switching between the UCLA, Stanford, UCSB and University of Utah was the first step of ARPANET. The funding made available was due to the perceived
competition of Russia’s launch of the Sputnik. The original goal in connecting different networks was not as much to share information, but to pool resources in computing and of course, to experiment.
In 1978, three researchers of the University of Southern California designed the TCP/IP protocol28, making a decentralized architecture and open communication
protocols the basis of the internet. Every new node is instantly connected to the larger whole as data packages find their way through a trial-and-error route until they reach
27 Castells, The Internet galaxy reflections on the Internet, business and society. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002, p.15.
28 Castells, p. 11. What they did was add the inter-network protocol (IP) to the already existing transmission control protocol (TCP), resulting in the standard on which the internet still runs today.
their end destination. We can see the military element here: if one part of the
infrastructure would be under attack, it wouldn’t mean the end of the whole system, since the remaining parts would still be able to function.
The UNIX community, using and promoting open source to improve software for the internet, added the culture of freedom to this equation. When Berners-Lee invented the software structure of the worldwide web, it was the “hacking” community that started releasing browsers and then improvement after improvement.
For our purpose, we should note that universities have been central to the creation of the internet. American universities helped create ARPANET, with the help of the resources of the American military. Before the invention of the world wide web, it was the computer departments of North American and European universities that were experimenting with all its possibilities, such as newsgroups or e-mails. What they left us with was a design perfectly suitable for scholarly exchange.
Why are academics relevant?
Why are academic culture and the internet relevant? In other words, why does it make sense to take changes in the academic practice as significant for the influence the internet has or can have on the whole of society? The answer is, because academic discussions are about as close as one can get to the ideal type of a pragma-dialectical or critical discussion (Van Eemeren, 2001). These discussions are based on argumentation, the ability to fully develop a line of reasoning and a willingness to take another side seriously and at its value.
Important features of a pragma-dialectical discussion are the idea that progress is possible, that there is a starting common ground and that following on each other’s arguments, new common ground can be defined. It differs in this sense from a debate that academics are not trying to prove they are right to a third party, but that they are instead offering a contribution to the ideal of an informed discussion where authors acknowledge the work done by their peers and make a genuine effort to redefine their stance and be open to serious criticism.
In the ideal model of a pragma-dialectical critical discussion29, four stages occur: those of confrontation (when contradiction of two standpoints first rise to the surface), opening (when a role is chosen), argumentation and conclusion. Conclusion as a final stage is often not reached; rather do we see a continuous stage of argumentation, where arguments are augmented as a reaction to criticism.
In publications by academics, whether it be in journals, edited volumes, monographs or in an online setting, these rules pretty much apply as a matter of courtesy. Tables, graphs or whole databases and models can support arguments. The internet was essentially designed in the first place to most efficiently disseminate military or scientific instructions and proceedings, as is discussed in the above section. Ideally, the internet is a much more safe and handy place to exchange and store
communication than thousands of different libraries with different contents.
Unlike different items such as books, maps and other documents that can be spread around in different libraries, even within different countries, the history and make-up of an academic discussion on the internet can always be retraced, especially when hyperlinks are referring back to digital articles of scientific publications.
Considering the difficulty some researchers have gone through in for example, the origin and history of ideas – would it be reasonable to expect that Grotius has read this or that treatise by Vossius, for example? – and the fact that the internet in its present shape has existed for about twenty years, it is not difficult to imagine the load of sources that are waiting to be studied for future historians of science. You can discern whole networks of scholars and schools and draw maps of the spatial and temporal evolution of certain doctrines within certain fields.
Another reason why academics make a relevant research subject, when it comes to the influence of the internet on the human mind is that academics are some of the best minds we have in society. In a minimalistic perspective, someone with a
position as researcher, whether it is a Ph.D. candidate or a professor, is smart and
29 A pragma-dialectical discussion differs from formal dialectics in that pragma(tism) replaces formal logic and adds insights of “ordinary language philosophers” and thus makes the concept useful and applicable to more general discussions as occur in academia, business fields and in magazines or
newspapers. In this way, it is not confined to the subfield of formal logical philosophy. I have chose to use this adaptation of Van Eemeren and Grootendorst (Van Eemeren, 15), since this can be applied to discussions in both journals and blogs.
capable of devoting time and attention to their job. If there is any group equipped to pursue all the possibilities that the internet has to offer in terms of sharing knowledge, data and coordination of pooling resources, it should be young Ph.D. candidates and university professors.
First of all, they are in the business of transmitting knowledge, evolving
theories to make sense of the different types of data they collect. They are eager enough to search for relevant information and data, and know enough to recognize an
interesting voice or exciting exchange of viewpoints. The internet has all the capabilities of making this possible. One enthusiastic blogger can connect researchers of the same topic in a direct and more informal way, than regular academics through meeting at a conference or through their scholarly articles.
The internet, besides being blessed with the latent capability of being a source of arguments, data and models to draw on, is also infamous for its capacity to distract instead of concentrating attention. All the findings of the influence on the internet on the workings of our brain are even more relevant for academics, because their mind is their main resource, it is where they add their value. For a receptionist or desk
employee to be distracted from their tasks by their e-mail or social networks probably only results in lower labour productivity in terms of quantity, whereas a distracted
mind for the researcher will mean less inspired research ideas, and connections missed. So the consequences for the scientist will be harsher. On the other hand, he may be expected to have more discipline and scrutiny. Arguments will be given, however, to find that just as science has been a motor for production of books in society, it will possibly be a motor of change in digitization at the expense of books. Relevance of this thesis is therefore first and foremost the consequences for science itself and the way it will change as well as, as an extra consequence, the outcome this development has for the position of books in society. Traditionally, scientists have fulfilled a vanguard role in society regarding the use of mediums to transmit and conserve ideas. The invention of the internet is one example of this, therefore their use of the internet is something to research.
The practice of academic publishing
The publishing of academic works, according to Thompson (p. 82), fulfils two functions, namely that of dissemination (and: archiving) and certification (authorisation).
Dissemination means making available the results of research in an effective way. The acceptance of an article by a respectable peer-reviewed journal or the publication of a book by an academic publisher also ‘bestows a degree of legitimacy or symbolic value’ on it: certification.
Let's take a look first at the practice of academic publishing of articles. Researchers submit an article to a journal. Then this goes into the reviewing process. Often an editor takes a first look to see whether the article is fit to go into the next stage of the process. When this is the case, other researchers will review the articles in what is called the peer-review process. These anonymous reviews are then sent back to the original writer, who can use the comments to improve his article.
The reviews function thus as an aid to the writer, but most of all they function as a threshold to guarantee the quality of the article for the specific journal. The reviewers are almost always anonymous, the writers in most cases, too. This is to prevent personal quarrels or nepotism from interfering with the academic principles that are used to judge the work presented in the article. Often, a scholar might try to get his article published in what is considered a leading journal. After a refusal, he might try to improve the article, or try to get it submitted to another journal.
There is a lot to say about this procedure’s efficiency or its consequences for institutionalized academic publishing in relation to new alternatives such as open access publishing, but for this thesis it suffices to have an understanding of the practice in publishing. One aspect is time. It often takes more than a year to get an article
actually published. If we take into account the time that it took to come up with the idea for the research and then the actual writing, it sometimes takes more than one and a half to two years for ideas and results of scientists to be published. In a world where “publish or perish” is the adage, one can understand that not all scientists have the patience to bear with this process. On the other hand, speed is not a feature per se of the scientific process. But for the individual researcher, this can be frustrating and he might look to the possibility of blogs to speed up the process from inception to publication.
Methodology of the case study
To say something relevant about the changing habits in academic culture, and more specifically, in the field of political science, this thesis builds on both quantitative and qualitative research methods. In this section I will outline the setup of a small case study.
I have looked at the sources used in randomly picked articles from two leading journals from both side of the Atlantic in the years 2000, 2005 and 2010, as online references in articles from the previous century in these journals are very rare. The combination of what scholars put out as their work, the changing attitudes of
universities on what is appropriate as a publication and the possible citation of online sources in paper articles will tell us something about where we are now.
Qualitatively, I have interviewed several professors and PhD candidates, about their experience with the use of digital text and online surroundings.30 This is
important, because if we look solely at the statistics, we may fail to see some of the changing processes in the academic environment. Think of a scholar who gained the idea of an article in an online discussion, but never mentions this in its bibliography, because it is not considered a reputable source. We can only find out about these examples by talking to the persons doing the research. I chose professors and
professors-to-be to check for a possible generation gap. Also, I want to hear if they feel that internet use enables them to do their work better or if they think of it as a
distraction. What are their experiences with students’ use of sources? Do they use books in their classes or only pdfs and online sources? Some of the findings of these interviews are presented in this chapter, but the interviews have also functioned as a general source of inspiration and notable points are discussed throughout this thesis as a whole.
In the above, I have sketched a research infrastructure that is heavily reliant on the internet in collecting data, looking up relevant literature and discussing and
connecting with colleagues. Researchers must check to see if assumptions are true in the world they are trying to study. In other words, is the transformation described actually going on? This thesis strives to present examples of the phenomenon as well as
30 I have spoken to three professors and eight Ph.D. students at the political science departments of both the University of Amsterdam and the VU University Amsterdam.
a theoretical analysis of its consequences. Still, students of the book should not shy away from numbers and hard data, as they tell us something about the bigger picture.
One way to see if there is a growing use of online sources for research is to check the references in scientific journals. The outline of this little survey is as follows. I take five articles each from two journals, one from each side of the Atlantic, and check for references to URLs or a mention of a website. To see if there is a change, I take one issue from 2000, one from 2005 and one from 2010. For each year, I take the first issue of that volume and select the first five articles, disregarding the introduction or note of the editor, if one is present. Multiple references to the same data set or website are counted as one.
As journals to research, I have selected two of the most important titles in the field, the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) and the European Journal of
Political Research (EJPR). Both are broadly oriented and welcome quantitative as well as
qualitative articles. Blackwell is the publisher of both titles, which are published on behalf of professional associations of political scientists, being the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) for the first, and the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) for the latter.
Since they count as top notch, we can assume a lot of the articles that are eventually published in other titles were originally presented to one or both of the above. The articles and authors may not count as a representative sample of the whole profession, but they do count as accepted and respected by the rest of the profession. If we had picked other, more specialist titles, it would be harder to make the case that the findings can be extrapolated to the rest of the field. But the most important feature of the chosen titles is that they match the criteria of political science as a broad discipline and that the authors investigated have different methods correspondingly.
Findings
Table 1 and 2 show my findings of online references in articles of the two chosen journals, for the relevant publication years. I have counted different ways of using online sources, so that we can distinguish between references in the actual text of the article versus an online source in the list of references of the article. The idea is that
naming an online source in the text itself gives greater visibility to the reader that online material was used and therefore should count as an even stronger indicator that online sources have become common use and acceptable in the research community. If the same site or database is used more than once in an article (i.e. the Library of
Congress Congressional Record), it is counted as one reference. Table 1. Online references in journal articles AJPS, five articles per volume
2000 2005 2010
An online source is mentioned in
the text 1 1 9
An online source is mentioned in
the list of references 0 3 12
Reference to on online data set for
replication purposes 1 4 7
E-mail address author is mentioned 5 5 5
Website author is mentioned 1 1 1
Table 2. Online references in journal articles EJPR, five articles per volume
2000 2005 2010
An online source is mentioned in the text
0 1 0
An online source is mentioned in
the list of references 0 0 4
Reference to on online data set for
replication purposes 0 0 5
E-mail address author is mentioned 5 5 5
Website author is mentioned 0 0 0
At least we can discern that over time, it has become more acceptable to use online sources in research, much more so in AJPS than EJPR, but even there, as expected, online sources were part of the references. Further research could go into a more complete survey of online sources used in journal articles, also taking into account more journal titles.
For our purpose, it is enough to have empirically verified our hypothesis of increased presence of online sources and mentions of these. This is a quantitative observation. Qualitatively, we can say a little bit about how online sources are used, when they are, in these thirty articles that we analysed. Mentioning the e-mail address seems standard, it is always mentioned together with the position, university and postal address of the author.
What we can see, however, is that articles containing the findings of quantitative research used online sources more than those articles representing qualitative research. This does not come as a surprise, since quantitative researchers
use more sources that are readily available online, such as electoral results, datasets online or quotations from Congressional records.
Online data sets have become much more common. Replication was always possible, of course; another researcher could gather the same data and run an analysis. However, in statistical analysis, a lot of work goes into finding the right data, and then often a stage of data recoding enters, to fit it in computable categories. This means that for a peer researcher who wants to challenge or just check a finding, he would have to retrieve the data (either online or by requesting it first), recode it, select the model and then run the relevant analyses and tests. What it comes down to is that replicating someone else’s research, takes a lot of time and hassle. Unless you want to prove a theory wrong, you wouldn’t go into it.
With the dataset online, a researcher can accomplish all of this in less than five minutes. One can download the file, adjust the theory (for example, choose a smaller or greater α) and see instantly the result, and consecutively decide whether one’s
suspicion is correct and if further replication is needed or not. One can also build on another’s data to elaborate on a subject in a new article. In short, having datasets online leads to better research, since not only another test besides reviewing is added, creating a threshold for better research, but it also facilitates collaboration and building on each other’s findings for new research.
Some journals even make placing the dataset tied to an article online a
prerequisite for accepting it (for AJPR, it is ‘strongly encouraged’). One can expect other journals, both within political science as within science as a whole, to follow. The
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), for instance, demands that data gathered through funded research be made available on its website.31
Ph.D. candidates’ experiences with the internet
One of the things I asked in my conversations with Ph.D. students was how many hours of the day they sat behind their screen. Most answered that their computer was always on, even if they were reading a paper text next to it. One candidate had the habit of turning off his computer if he was to do serious reading.
All candidates used Google Scholar as a starting point of their research. Once established that an article is interesting, it is printed out. One interesting route was tracing back literature. So if they noticed that a title was cited often, then that would be a clue to borrow the book. But, one researcher said with some guilt in her eyes: ‘There is a threshold for books. You have to go to the library and afterwards, you have to go back to return it.’ Only titles that can beforehand be said to prove valuable are ordered. All used the digital library to search and retrieve articles. One person asked out loud: ‘I wonder how they used to do it with those paper journals, back in the days.’
All of them struggled with building a personal archive of articles. Some put away their printouts in different folders, whereas others did the same with the digital file. One had a single text document with bibliographical references of all the articles he had read as his archive: ‘If I need an article, I download it again.’ Not one of them was writing an old-fashioned monograph: ‘That era came to an end five years ago.’
No one made heavy use of discussion forums or blogs to exchange ideas with peers on a regular basis. It will be interesting to repeat this research in ten years, to see if the opportunities the web offers are used more widely. They did use the internet to communicate with peers or co-authors, but only incidentally. Examples of this include using Dropbox with a co-author to synchronize the document, skyping with co-authors or posting a statistical question on a specialized forum.
Distraction and compulsive checking of Facebook, Academia.edu or e-mail was a matter recognized by all of them. Some of them said they ‘should’ close their mail client or stop using Facebook, others negated the claim that internet proves to be too much distraction. One person said: ‘Distraction can come from anywhere.’
The skills of students (most of the Ph.D. candidates lecture, too) are evaluated as poorly when it comes to looking up relevant sources. Google Scholar is advised to them, as this site is more intuitive in its use than the search portal of the digital library. One lecturer put it this way: ‘Their digital capabilities are sufficient, but their knowledge of the field not yet.’ It therefore makes more sense to use articles than books, since articles are shorter and therefore their core is more easily grasped than that of a book. To get a sense of the meaning of a book, one would have to at least spend a couple of hours with it. We will use this given in the next chapter.
4. The changing library
If there is a place on campus and within the university as an organization where the shift from print to digital as means of consumption of knowledge is clearly visible, it is the library.32 In this chapter, I look at how scholars and students use the library. I describe the evolution within the library of digital over print and the article over the book. In the next chapter, findings so far are tied into a narrative on how this evolution might in fact not mean progress per se.
Libraries and students
University libraries have struggled with rising prices from publishers and changing needs and demands from their users. Walk into a university library nowadays and you will find computers before books or journals. Many students today only read articles from journals through the downloaded pdf, on the screen or as a print-out. I have asked students whether they would be able to find the paper version of the journal in the stacks and they have answered they didn’t even know in what location of the several departments of the building they would have to seek. Some students confessed they have only visited the library through their own VPN-connected laptop, meaning the digital library. The physical library has no meaning to them.
Libraries have responded in different ways to changing circumstances. Most have submitted themselves to the notion that print is dead and have moved away their books collection, or an ever-growing portion of it, to the basement or a remote location. The books can then be obtained through an online ordering system. In theory, this does not prohibit anyone to get the books they want to use. But in practice, it seals off the open line between students and the books. For one, it takes away the experience of walking to a section of the library and browse through the different titles, read their blurbs or check the table of contents. Maybe you went to get one title and left with other books standing next to them.
Nowadays, a student browses enough already, be it on Firefox or Chrome and not through the stacks. The second reason that the availability of books is important is that one has to compare it with the instant availability of online sources to students. If a
paper is due, and you are used to have all data ready with a mouse click, ordering a book to collect it the next day at the library seems incredibly slow and inefficient,
especially if you are not sure yet whether the book will be useful. Of course there will be students who will continue to look for books or those students that start in time to prepare, so that day of waiting is not really a problem. But the point is we have to look at these kinds of practicalities as well if we want to understand why books are used less and less.
There are two common ways to respond to this situation. One is to take a leap forward and advocate the scanning of all books and getting rid of them afterwards, the other is to argue that it does not matter that these books are used less and as long as they are available in some way, the problem is not that big. The reality is that there is not enough money to scan all books, but one has to question whether this would solve the problem at all.
Double-F reading and creating meaning
Reading online and on a screen is different than reading from paper, one of the reasons why people still print out texts to peruse. What I gathered from my interviews with university lecturers is that they feel a need to cater to students’ digital environments, for example by setting up a Facebook group for their course or distributing all reading materials digitally instead of in an old-fashioned bound reader.
What some fail to see, is that this new way of interacting with students is strengthening their ties to the screen, making books less and less viable to them. One lecturer told me he had stopped doing it in the middle of the course and obliged every student to bring a hard copy of the text to class, because otherwise they wouldn’t read it.
Digital reading for students often amounts to what I would like to coin double-F reading. The first F refers to the popular ctrl+F function, to search for a word or phrase. The second F refers to the famous F-shaped reading discovered by Jakob Nielsen, who researched the way people read on the web using an eye tracking study.33 They make an
33 ‘F-shaped pattern for reading web content’, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html, accessed May 7, 2012. The F stands for fast as well. Double-F can then also mean fast food reading. One might take in a lot of chunks of text, but its nutritional value and its digestion is limited.
