The increasing mechanization of print facilitated a shift from intensive reading to
extensive reading. Around 1750 there was a dramatic change in the way people read
documents. Before this time, people were reading intensively. They had only a few
books to read and they read them over and over again. By the early 1800s, however,
people started to read things extensively. They read all kinds of materials, especially
periodicals and newspapers, and moved through one item after another[4]. With the
advent of computers and the Internet, the recent decades have witnessed another
drastic change in the way people read: Browsing or scanning is becoming a principal
reading pattern in today’s information-intensive environment. Birkerts stresses[5]:
“In our culture, access is not a problem, but proliferation is. And the reading act is
necessarily different than it was in its earliest days. Awed and intimidated by the
availability of texts, faced with the all but impossible task of discriminating among
them, the reader tends to move across surfaces, skimming, hastening from one
site to the next without allowing the words to resonate inwardly.” As a result, we
“know countless more ‘bits’ of information, both important and trivial, than our
ancestors.”
Bolter states[6]: “The shift from print to the computer does not mean the end of
literacy itself, but the literacy of print, for electronic technology offers us a new
kind of book and new ways to write and read.” Digital media contribute to a transformative
shift in reading. They also introduce a number of powerful advantages
that are traditionally absent in the print environment, such as interactivity, nonlinearity,
immediacy of accessing information, and the convergence of text, images