Chapter
2:
In Chapter 2 of Carroll's "Writing for Digital Media textbook," he explored the differences between reading novels or articles on print and reading online on a blog or website. Specifically, under the section of "Readability and Scan-ability," I found his statement, "If there is a lot of content to present, it should be layered, or arrayed to permit drilling, skipping and scanning," thoroughly interesting. I began doing research on the blogs and websites that I turn my attention to and if that applied to the websites that I read articles on. For example, there's this online digital magazine called Thought Catalogue that I believe is catered towards a younger generation, like 20 and 30 year olds. When I first began following the articles on that website, a lot of them would be written like a book or essay would be written - an entire page filled with text and little to no images.
Now, as I am exploring through a lot of their more recent articles, I noticed that a lot of them are now being written in bullet point form instead of just paragraphs of paragraphs of text, and in addition to that, they are also often adding large images or even videos in between the texts. The article that I am currently looking at by the way, is called "11 Life Hacks for The Emotionally Struggling 20-something." In this article, even though it is still written in paragraph form, the author has chosen to highlight and bold the key points of the paragraph, perhaps intentionally in the way that Carroll says is for the purpose of "permitting drilling, skipping and scanning." Anyway, after doing some research, I found some interesting statistics that may be why online writers are trying to write in list/bullet form as opposed to long paragraphs. In this one particular study, they developed five different types of versions of the same website - meaning all of the content was the same, just that they would structure it differently.
When I got to Chapter 3 to the part where Jakob Nielsen conducted a research that showed Web users read 25% more slowly on screen than on paper, I wanted to explore more on Neilsen's discovery and see what other studies had been done to prove that. I ended up surprising myself, not finding research to back up Neilsen's research, but rather watching an interview conducted by New York Times on a family and their opinions on digital reading versus reading paper. The parents of course, were more traditional and read newspapers, magazines, books etc and were very much regulars at the local library. Their son however, was an active online reader. I thought it was really interesting in his interview that he brought up the fact that he finds online reading appealing because of the conversations that many websites allow you to have with other readers. I do think that there are pros to that because talking to other people about it might make you think about what you read in a different way, in another perspective that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. Some of these pros include better development of cognitive and critical thinking and also writing skills as well.
Just for fun:
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