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History of the Book Final Project!
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History of the Book Final Project!
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Jenna discusses print culture and digital culture, emphasizing the values and differences between the two. She highlights the permanency and originality of print culture, while digital culture focuses more on communication and immediate consumption. Jenna also explores the impact of technology on education, media literacy, and reading comprehension. She discusses the challenges of sorting through information on the internet and the importance of media literacy. Additionally, she mentions a study that found better comprehension with print material compared to digital formats, except for weight loss articles, which were more engaging in a digital format. Jenna also touches on the impact of writing digitally versus by hand, noting that writing by hand is believed to be more effective for learning and retaining information. She concludes by acknowledging the ongoing discussion and research surrounding the effects of print and digital culture on society. Hi, it's Jenna. So I originally tried to do this all on Audacity because that's what I normally use for podcasts, but it really decided to not work at all this time, so I'm doing this on my phone. So today I want to talk about print culture and digital culture. And I want to loosely examine what those terms mean for things like education, but overall really on media literacy and how we read. So let's get into it. So something that I really want to focus on is how we can distinguish the values of both print culture and digital culture and how we can really apply those to our society to help us as readers and learners. So first I'm going to dive into some definitions of words that are going to be thrown around a lot. So print culture is the variety of effects that forms of print have had on human society. And print can encompass a lot of things, whether it's newspapers or books or transcripts. There's a lot that goes into that. So then we have digital culture, which is the relationship between people and the use of technology. It can also be considered the values, beliefs, behaviors, and technology that shape the way we work and interact in a digital environment. And then media literacy is the ability to access and analyze media along with being able to reflect upon it. So some other terms that I think are really important to talk about have to do with print culture and what marks print culture. So those terms are fixity, standardization, and dissemination. So I'll define those two. Fixity is basically the permanency or the ability to withstand time without changing, which a physical codex is capable of. Standardization refers to confirming things like language, format, and anything else to make it measurable to a widespread audience. So a good way to think of that is like the scientific units of measurement. They're all standardized for efficiency and accuracy in that field. And then dissemination is just the circulation of a text or a work. So those are things that print culture centers around. And along with that, in terms of fixity, you kind of think about the preservation of language or information in some type of way. So that can go under fixity and standardization. And as Professor James Nessel from the University of Leeds put it, as description and dissemination determine how information is stored and shared, print enables memory to function beyond the individual. Like all print, printed ephemera permits text in the broadest sense to be in the world, but it does so for only a moment. This material is intended to pass away, but it bears its inscriptions nonetheless. So that really shows the permanency behind print. You can find something 200 years from now, and yet the language might not be used super easily to understand, but it's all still there for you in kind of its original intended form. And I don't think that's something we really get from digital culture, because that exists now more for the sake of faster and more widespread communication than it is for memory. So you're seeing this immediate consumption that kind of goes into both, but the withstanding of the original form that only exists in print, because you see things like websites being updated all the time. And then if something's not touched up for a while, the link is eventually going to break, and you won't be able to access another website that's not being updated anymore. So I know that digital culture has a lot of pros, and we'll get into those. But I also know that it's co-existing with print culture and even encroaching upon it in some ways, and we'll get into that too. But it's important to examine how this hybrid print and digital culture has affected us as learners and as people, because this question isn't something we can easily answer, especially since we have more information and studies coming out about this kind of stuff almost every day. So it's not set in stone, which can kind of show the point of fixity of it. With things like digital culture and the Internet, things are always going to be subject to change. Like I said before, articles have to be changed and updated as things change. But if all of this is constantly changing, we're not going to have access to the original, like I said. But in print culture, if I'm holding a physical book or a piece of text that's already fixed, I can go back to the printing process and make a change if I'd like. But the first book that I'm still holding doesn't have those changes. It's like an artifact of frozen in time that way. But digital culture really shows the ephemerality of everything. It's like that constant competition of being up-to-date. And something else about that is I'm definitely at that weird age where I got to grow up until about being like 12 or so without a ton of technology in my face. But after that, it was everywhere with things like social media and school. And don't get me wrong, I think that using technology in school can be really helpful. But the sudden jump has had me thinking about what kids now are transitioning into with digital technology in schools and even what kids before me had versus didn't have in school. So then I saw something really interesting that I find relevant to the idea of this hybrid age. And it's that we make a lot of use of media, but we necessarily forget most of it. And this isn't on purpose, but it's become a byproduct of how we live and the disposability of things in this age. It almost reminds me of Socrates, believing that writing would negatively impact our memory. And now we don't have to remember if things are going to be recorded forever, especially because we can search a fact real quick if need be. However, there is something really tricky about that, and it has to do with media literacy. Because if you're searching for something on the Internet, how reliable are those first few answers and links that we come across? It's no secret that we're in an age of information, but misinformation can be spread so easily. And I saw something about this recently in my own life. There was a myth circulating online about how we supposedly swallow eight spiders a year while we sleep. It's not true, don't worry. I saw people freaking out on TikTok about it. So it makes me wonder, why didn't they do research if they're genuinely worried about it? I don't know, but then they're going and they're getting this problem all over and causing fear everywhere because they didn't do the research to stop it where it is. So I decided to do a Google search for it. But I had to get near the bottom of the first page of results before I could find a clear-cut yes or no answer. And the answer's no, it's not true, so don't worry. But that kind of shows that anyone can make a post on the Internet and make it look legit if they're good enough with technology. But not just anyone can go and get a book published with misinformation because it goes through rounds and rounds of checks for that. So it really shows we have so much information at the tip of our hands, but are we able to take any of it at face value? How are we supposed to sort through information to get what we actually need? And how we're doing all of this affects media literacy since the average person doesn't spend time making sure that the media they consume is legitimate. And then moving on a little bit, I want to talk about almost reading comprehension, but it still has to do with media literacy. There was a study done by the British Journal of Psychology, and they featured it in an academic article about how the medium can influence the message. So in most cases like reading a story or a persuasive message, the participants had a much better comprehension when reading print material instead of on an e-reader. However, the thing that I found interesting was that when it came to weight loss articles specifically, participants were more interested when it was on a digital format versus print, specifically an iPad in this study. And this was only done considering weight loss and obesity articles, but I wonder if there's going to be any like forthcoming information about the broader ranging health and self-help areas coming out anytime soon. And I think that that area of even like print fields and books, so even e-books about that has become a little more popular since COVID. But the thing is that you'd think reading digitally would be more efficient simply because you can get your hands on it faster and in a lot of cases for free because you can pilot it and other things. And I mean, who doesn't like that? But the other thing is that it's not just about reading either. This stuff impacts our writing too. So even doing things like writing digitally versus in print, we see this. So typing is obviously faster and we know that, but it's been proven that writing by hand is the best way to learn and retain information. And the thing is even like right before COVID though, pretty much all of my work for high school was digital, and I know that it's super easy to have everything in one place, but it also gave me more of a distance from my school work. I felt like I was just going through the motions to get things done instead of actually interacting with the material and learning from it. So going off the bat a little bit, in a study by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, writing by hand activated widespread connectivity across multiple brain regions, and then typing led to minimal activity in those same areas. So I figured out how it's totally possible to type alongside a lecture to take notes and get literally everything that someone sent down. And there's also things like voice-to-text controls on a lot of computers, so people can just record someone speaking and get their notes from that. It would be a hot jungle, but I know a lot of people that do that. I don't know how they read their notes, but that's on them. It's just too much information. But when you're listening by ear and you have to handwrite your notes, you're going to have to pick and choose what you think is most important to retain, and this has you more actively involved in your own learning process also. So then the idea of digital versus print in classrooms, I talked to two of my cousins. One of them is currently in seventh grade, and one of them is a sophomore in high school. I wanted to see what had changed since I was there, since we had actually recovered from the pandemic by this point, and I wanted to see if that really had much of an impact, but it's a bit inconclusive with that. So both of them said that they don't take notes in their classes at all, and their teachers post PowerPoints and sometimes even videos with lessons for them online for them to look at. And I just think it's really strange and kind of an idol that we're learning because that's encouraging students to do their own independent thinking anymore. They don't handwrite things in their classes, they said. So they're not activating multiple brain regions, as I said before. So how are they actively learning is what I'm really wondering, and what can we do to encourage independent thinking and critical thinking to help them learn? And I also found a New York Times article from 2019, and it said that the performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000. And this is really when technology came on the scene, even when it wasn't super widespread in school systems yet, but we still have, like, television sets and all at home and stuff like that. But we've been hearing about a reading crisis ever since the pandemic, but I think it was really important to note that this isn't recent news or set on by the pandemic, but it is something that's getting a lot worse very quickly. And I don't think digital culture is entirely to blame for this because it's not the only culprit. There's also issues like understaffed and underfunded schools, and there's curriculums that have to be smushed into a year and a grade level. And, yeah, COVID has not helped, but it was around long before then. This issue was around long before then. So videos and online activities were really helpful during COVID, but it almost seems like we haven't really transitioned back into reading as a form of learning, especially social reading in a classroom together. And I think that that's really important considering that reading is a basis for writing and communication amongst other things. So if we're thinking about that, what's the proper way of learning and how can we embody it? We need to help our youth that way. So this can't be answered easily. We need things like more funding and more adequately equipped educators, which is a lot easier said than done. Obviously, we need achievable curriculums and adjustments that fit student needs, which is also a lot easier said than done. And then we need to figure out what the point is between learning in print and digitally and how we can combine those two tools to help students with their comprehension and growth long-term. And even when it has to do with reading on your own for leisure and not just typical, like, learning, it's not the purpose of learning. You're doing it on your own time for fun. I found a new meta-analysis of the link between leisure reading, like reading for fun, and comprehension, and it confirms previous findings that printed material beats digital content. And it found that print is six times better at boosting comprehension skills. So while many schools now are teaching children using things like computers and e-readers and tapas, experts are starting to warn that it could be undermining reading comprehension. So this is a review of 25 studies involving 470,000 students. They found that digital reading had a negative impact on comprehension for elementary and middle school students. And although reading from screens had a more positive impact for high school and university students, it was still far less beneficial than print. So researchers are starting to estimate that if a student spends 10 hours reading in print in their free time, their ability to comprehend will likely be about six to eight times higher than if they read on digital devices for that same amount of time. So books are more likely to engender that kind of deep reading that lays the foundation for critical thinking, experts say. So then academics from the University of Valencia suggest that digital reading may hamper comprehension because it's often a device that services other purposes and can distract readers, which I'll also talk about later. They also argue that the Internet has formed lower-quality content, which is often shorter and fast-paced with less sophisticated vocabulary. And I think I'd agree with that. So Lydia Altamora, she's a PhD student at the University of Valencia. She said in her thesis paper that, based on our results, we cannot just assume that all leisure reading will be beneficial for developing readers. The medium used matters. For developing readers, major digital reading does not seem to pay off in terms of reading comprehension, at least not as much as traditional print reading does. So is there an excess use in digital technology that's causing these problems, is the question. So again, think about how reading digitally can offer distractions. It's so tempting to click away to a game or even take a hyperlink and another hyperlink, just hyperlink after hyperlink until you're so far from the topic at hand that you don't even remember what you were originally reading about. Yeah, we have some people using tables or e-readers that just have that, but most people would rather jump at the chance of a more multifunctional device because that is very cost-efficient to do multiple things. And it's not even just about distractions anymore, either. It's also about how we aren't closely reading the text when it's digital. We're more likely to partake in the practice of hyperreading, which is a term coined by literary critic M. Catherine Hale, and it's where we're using the digital technology to assist our reading. This could be in searching for key terms to find the main gist of it as people play it. While this is an affordance, I feel that it's stretching to more of a detriment with the way we use it because we're not really using the text or our brains to their potential when we're not actively reading and working to understand the piece as a whole. This could also have to do with our good-natured patience with reading, especially since it's so easy to get off the task at hand when not reading in print, and everyone can admit that they do it. It's okay. We're more tempted to just get through it at this point instead of taking our time with the reading experience. So even with this being said, I realize that I'm kind of bashing digital culture a bit. I think that any kind of encouragement to get kids and teenagers reading, whether it's print or digital, is still absolutely crucial at our current state because there's less of us reading than ever. I would say that reading in print is obviously ideal given the information, but we need to take what we can get, and if it's easier to accomplish right now, then so be it. All right. So I understand that I did just bash digital culture a bit, but I want to talk about the affordances of it because we talked about a lot of the affordances of print culture over it. But digital culture offers us a lot because it encourages even faster communication and more widespread accessibility to different types of books. We can also carry different forms of media like text and videos and music, amongst other things, where print can carry text and certain types of images in most cases. So you can simplify a lot of mundane processes with digital devices and the Internet too, like defining a word. Instead of pausing and flipping through a dictionary, finding the right word, finding the right definition, you just have to open another tab on the computer and type in, like, definition of. And while we're normally not supposed to, well, as I said before, can we really trust what comes up in the first few things, definitions from, like, Merriam-Webster and things are normally what comes up first when you search for a word's definition, and that's pretty reliable. That algorithm seems to follow itself pretty well. And we can even consider the adaptability of digital media and text as it can be centric to change or be corrected with current developments and such because that's a practical use with efficient payoffs, like the other things I mentioned that you're going to stay up to date, which is a really good thing, depending on if that's what you want. However, I'm still going to argue that print culture comes in with more long-term payoffs, like better comprehension, fixity, and almost guaranteed accuracy. I mean, that depends on when the book was published and if something was proven wrong since then, but you know that the information you're getting was reliable for the time it was published. And, yeah, at that point, it's typically going to be more reliable. So if we're going to understand some of the affordances and detriments of both print and digital culture, how do we move forward to help our education systems and ourselves as readers? So the best bet is taking what works from both and using them for the intended purpose that would make them beneficial to them and us. So, obviously, we can't get rid of the cons we have when using them, but when we redefine how we should be using reading and digital technology together, we can work more effectively as a hybrid society. So we want to take the affordances that we get from print culture and incorporate that into learning, and we want to take the ones from digital culture and incorporate that into learning the best we can. And, yeah, there's still going to be an overlap, but we have to look at what's helping more, and in this case, when it comes to things like reading, they need to be doing it on print. So it's not an either-or choice still. We can use both of them, and we really should, but we need to figure out how to best do that. So hopefully there will be more studies and all coming out soon, but I think it's really important to understand that print culture and digital culture go hand in hand. Again, it's not an either-or thing. We have to use them to our advantage, and we have to understand that they have to offer us instead of just going through motions and not understanding the implications of our actions with these things. So thank you.
