Publish at July 05 2010 Updated September 14 2023
Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What Internet Is Doing to Our Brains and of a resounding web article entitled " Est-ce que Google nous rend idiot? Narvic, who relays this writing model on the Novövision blog, explains that "it's not a question of removing hypertext links, but of gathering them all together at the end of the article, rather than sprinkling them throughout the text. For him, it's a question of the quality of the attention we pay to the text we're reading ".
The problem Nicholas Carr is trying to solve is the difficulty of digital reading for users accustomed to reading print. Alain Giffard describes the situation on his blog:
" The act of digital reading is complicated and difficult. These difficulties, highlighted by psychologists and cognitive scientists, are of all kinds: the visibility of text on the screen, typography and page layout, the detour of attention by the bifurcations of hypertext, the lack of integration of reading operations, which prevents the reader from projecting his or her model of understanding of the text being read ".
Carr, who focuses on hypertextuality, believes it to be a major source of distraction and, ultimately, incomprehension when not used rationally. Narvic retorts that the discomfort caused by hypertext is the same as that felt when faced with a book crammed with infrapaginal notes.
In the same vein, Bertrand Calenge argues that hypertextuality in itself is not a problem (Carr doesn't disagree!). "What's most lacking in the profusion of texts and links is real, solid, structured content, thought, real creation, things worth reading. The rest, in fact, leads to repetitive browsing...".
According to Narvic, the debate launched by Carr is not a minor one;
" We can reply that the text is not formed by its writer, but by its reader, precisely through his or her reading, and that the author's role in this has always been overestimated. It's in the course of reading that the reader himself produces the meaning of what he reads, and that's why no two people read the same thing in the same text, even though it was written by a single author ".
Alain Giffard distinguishes two types of digital reading: pre-reading and reading. Pre-reading is a preparatory operation, a first degree of reading prior to the act of reading. Initial browsing can be considered as pre-reading. Then comes reading, which, as we assume, must be accompanied by reflection.
However, we can also distinguish two levels of reading: informational reading and sustained, study reading. The question is which of these levels of reading is possible in a digital environment. Giffard responds by citing a 2006 article on the subject, which concluded that "in the context of digital reading, it is difficult to go beyond scan reading to sustained reading, i.e. not only information reading, but also study reading ".
If Yann Leroux is to be believed, with time, sustained reading will be possible in a digital environment. " What we're witnessing is rather the clash of two techniques: that of writing and that of digital, with the complication that digital is a young technique. With digital technology, we don't benefit from the patina of the long partnership between writing and paper. We still have to tame digital materials to turn them into materials for thinking ".
Bertrand Calenge agrees, saying that " when it comes to reading, assimilating and critiquing the written word, it's not so much a question of teaching new generations how to use the Internet properly (they'll have to conquer this universe and create and transmit its codes) as of continuing to imbue them with the good old-fashioned printed word in its various forms ".
Alain Giffard, for his part, calls for dual training in both traditional and digital reading. He concludes: " Any other orientation can only be a cognitive and cultural catastrophe ".
See :
Narvic on Novövision: Is the link killing the text?
Michael Agger: I read on the Web, so I think differently
Alain Giffard: Digital reading and written culture
Yann Leroux: The pen is a virgin, the Internet a whore
Bertrand Calenge: How to read?
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