Subject: Re: Do we form or respond to reading levels? & New media skills From: wilt@rt66.com (bill wilt) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 10:00:36 -0400

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At 7:05 PM 7/14/98, Eric Meyer wrote:
>-----------> This message was posted to the ONLINE-NEWS list. <-----------
>
>At 9:57 on 14 Jul 98, William Leonhirth  wrote in part:
>
>> Don't know what a word means? Highlight it.
>
>What's to make us believe that a person who doesn't understand a word 
>will click on it when he or she won't look it up in a regular 
>dictionary?

Direct answer: Our belief in the innate curiosity of human beings would make us "believe" they'd look it up if it were easily done. What would have us not believe that they would, would be, I submit, a contrary belief that people are naturally stupid and lazy.

>
>It's a cute gimmick, I've ["I'll"? bw] grant you -- one of the original uses of
>hypertext. [But not currently as an ordinary feature of writing on the web.] But the likely result is an increase in the difficulty of
>reading and, therefore, a decrease in the number of people
>attempting it. 
>
>Instead of being able to instantaneously and subconsciously acquire
>knowledge in linear fashion, processors of such material will have
>to activate hyperlinks encapsulating polysyllabic terminologies,
>devise new schemas allowing comprehension of such nomenclature, then
>reintegrate these virginal constructs into a suspended operation of
>parafoveal informational processing. 

Eric, thanks for "parafoveal". I had to take out Webster's 3rd, because it wasn't in the American Heritage Electronic Dictionary--circa 1990--spinning on my drive. But it certainly doesn't quite fit the general description of "reading" you're parodying, as I suspect that, because the "fovea centralis" ('a small rodless area of the retina that affords acute vision') and the part of the retina around (para) that divot (fovea) is not the _only_ part of the eyes used for reading--though I know you've done research in this area, and I could be waaay off. On the other had, had I hyper-links and hyper-links, I would undoubtedly explored a little bit into the world of human image-capture and image-processing, because it's interesting, it's part of my every-day life, and I once met a kid from MIT who was spending a summer sticking probes into the brains of Rhesus monkeys, a long time ago, to find out how all that vision stuff works in primates. That is, if the link had been there. And I doubt that reading EVER has permitted anyone to "instantaneously and subconsciously acquire knowledge in linear fashion," except for such things as one-word signs/symbols like "Gefahr!" or "Avertissement!", and only then with training and after having had a non-linear breakthrough in comprehension, as when, less ordinarily and more dramatically than most humans, Helen Keller "instantaneously and _consciously_" acquired the knowledge of the smell and feeling of water and the feeling of, was it, of vibrations in the throat--or was it the sensation of a hand-sign. Don't remember.

>
>In other words, it interrupts the flow when you have to click on 
>big words, figure out what they mean, then go back and figure out the 
>whole sentence. 

Yes, just as do misspellings, illiterate and ungrammatical constructions, malpronounced verbiage, misregistered colored text, smudged ink, pages cut off before the print ends. But you can choose to click a link or not. With the printed word, there's a reach or a walk to the dictionary--or if the page's cut off, no choice at all. 
>
>Technology is wonderful. It gives us many tools. How we use them is
>up to us. Instant definitions have all the same potential to improve 
>our writing as spell-check has for improving our spelling and  
>grammar-check has for improving our grammar. 

Yes. All that's quite true. And if "all of the people [using spell-check] all of the time" ignore the "substitutions" box, etc., then, indeed, zero improvement impact. The grammar checkers I've seen aren't as good as Strunk & White or Fowlers or Bernstein, and are often "off" in some way. But if you do pay attention, hey, I don't miss traveling as much as I used to (I used to do "travelling" all the time)--though it hasn't had any impact on my air-fare expenditures.

And if we [the folks who dish words, audio, video, database, to whomever] have it that people are stupid and lazy, we won't provide the "wonderful" technology, because it takes too much time and effort--and, as people ourselves, we must also be stupid and lazy. On the other hand, if we have it that "some of the people are stupid and lazy all of the time, and some of the people are stupid and lazy some of the time, but not all of the people are stupid and lazy all of the time," well, we might just take the hyperlinking effort on--and if we used the links ourselves, hey, our own writing might get more precise. Imagine if lawyers and judges used dictionaries in doing their work! [And did not eschew the adjuration: Caution, Engage Brain Before Starting Fingers."]

Tho's. Hobbes wrote that it was in a state of unsocialized nature that there would be: "...no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Quite the contrary in our partially civilized society.


bw


--
Bill Wilt                 http://www.rt66.com/wilt/
How do you add value in a two-way, all-digital world that you couldn't before?   
   e-mail: wilt@RT66.com      fax: 781-209.1983     voice: 781-209.1982
        145 Black Bear Drive, # 2028, Waltham, Massachusetts 02451-0225
--



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