Digitization, Reading, and the Body: Handling Texts on Paper and Screens
Anne Mangen
The ongoing transition from paper/print to screens reveals the extent to which reading is multisensory and embodied, involving in particular our fingers and hands in manually engaging with a text.
Our modes of reading are changing. Whether we are reading to pass time on our way to work, are studying for an exam in the library, or are browsing through today’s news or enjoying a novel at home - in many of these cases, reading entails engaging with a digital screen device rather than with materials printed on the substrate of paper. Laptops, tablets, and smart phones are doing the job of “old” reading technologies such as print books and newspapers, while also being multipurpose devices with which we entertain ourselves with movies, chat with friends and family, pay our bills, and coordinate our children’s school activities.
Digitization is massively and rapidly affecting our reading behavior, and it is futile to try to give a simple, general answer to the question of whether we read “better” or “worse” as an effect of this transition. Such questions require fine-tuning in terms of what type of text/material we have in mind (narrative texts or news entries? Long or short texts? Simple or complex?), the purpose of reading (study? Leisure? Information updates?), the type of device (desktop computer? Smart phone?), the physical location (at the office? On the train or at a cabin)? Indeed, Anezka Kuzmicova and her colleagues (see Kuzmicova et al., 2018) have shown that physical location and social context - whether a reader is, for instance, alone or in the company of others - may affect aspects of reading, such as supporting the sense of immersion or the conjuring of mental imagery. Other factors probably matter, too. Amidst all these changes, one dimension emerges as being more fundamental than hitherto acknowledged: the role of the body, and of embodiment, in reading.
Whether for study, pleasure, or information, we typically read by holding the text in our hands. Reading has always been embodied, inviting and requiring certain postures and dexterous movements to access and process the texts. The ongoing replacement of print books with digital devices brings the haptics of reading to the fore, inviting us to reconsider the role of embodiment for cognitive as well as emotional aspects. Often called “active touch,” haptics is an umbrella term for the combination of senses of touch via the skin, and movement of our joints and limbs - most typically, our fingers and hands. Applied to reading, haptics refers to the ways in which we use our fingers and hands to hold the text and the device on which the text is displayed, the ways we turn the pages back and forth, use our index finger to guide and sharpen our visual gaze, and use our fingers as place holders. For a long time, thanks to the dominance of the print book, the embodied aspects of reading have not been granted much attention. However, with much of our reading now performed with a screen device rather than with paper, the embodiment - in particular, the haptics - of reading takes on fresh urgency.
Take a closer look at your fingers next time you pick up your smart phone to check the news, and compare with your fingers as they handle the pages of a print magazine. Or, take a moment during your reading of a novel on the Kindle or iPad, to reflect on the feel when holding the device and swiping the screen to turn the pages. Then compare this with page-turning in a print book. The materiality of the substrate - screen displays and paper pages -provides different tactile feedback to your fingers and hands, hence engaging your body and brain differently. Whether, how and to what extent such differences have an effect on how we read, are intriguing questions that reading researchers are only beginning to understand, and findings from empirical research on screen reading indicate that there is indeed more to reading than meets the eye. More specifically, the physicality of the substrate of paper may contribute to certain cognitive and emotional aspects of reading in ways that we have yet to fully acknowledge and comprehend.
A wealth of research has compared paper and screen reading, from reading fairytales in print and on tablets with toddlers and preschoolers, to studies measuring recall and comprehension among high school students reading print text books and their digital equivalents, to adults reading novels in book format and on tablets and e-readers. The diversity of methodologies, designs, and texts used, precludes a simple answer to the question of “P(rint) vs E(lectronic).” However, recent meta-analyses (see Delgado et al., 2018, as an example) have shown that, for the reading of informational texts, there is a screen inferiority when it comes to reading comprehension. In other words, people tend to comprehend a text better when they read it on paper compared to reading it on a screen. Moreover, the difference in reading comprehension in favor of paper has in fact increased rather than decreased over the past couple of decades. Such findings cast serious doubts on persistent claims about digital natives being better at reading on screens than on paper.
The reasons provided for the screen inferiority are related to what is called "The Shallowing Hypothesis” (see Wolf, 2018). Given that our most common modes of engaging with texts occur online, we acquire a habit of quickly perusing an enormous amount of text and information, rarely stopping to engage with any of it more deeply and conscientiously. These screen-based habits then “bleed over,” to use Wolf’s term, to our mode of reading on paper -resulting in the feeling that our concentration starts to drift after a couple of pages, and that we have to make an effort to stay focused. As Nicholas Carr observed in The Atlantic in 2008, “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
Why do many of us find it so difficult to engage in deep reading and, concomitantly, deep thinking, on screen? Plausible explanations can be found in the embodied dimensions of reading and in the differences in sensorimotor contingencies between screens and paper as substrates for text presentation. Sensorimotor contingencies refer to the sets of structured laws prescribing the sensory changes brought about by one’s movement and/or manipulation of objects: How we perceive the look, smell, sound and feel of objects in our surroundings depends on how we move around in the world, and manipulate and move objects around in, most often, our hands.
These laws are specific to the various sense modalities, meaning that the sensorimotor contingencies for vision are different from those for hearing, which are yet again different from those of the sense of touch, smell, etc. Moving an object around in our hands will provide abundant information about its properties - texture, size, shape, weight, etc., only some of which are available when we merely look at the object. However, when seeing an apple on the kitchen counter, our numerous prior, embodied experiences with simultaneously seeing and touching an apple will shape our predictions about what it will feel like if/when we pick it up and move it around in our hand. Vision and touch are intimately entwined in our ongoing perception and experience of our surroundings -vision, and therefore also reading, is “textured.” This texture is provided by the substrate on which the text is displayed - whether sheets of paper bound together in a book, a piece of cardboard, or an LCD touch screen.
Importantly, the sensorimotor contingencies of the book differ from those of a screen: A text may look identical when printed on a page and displayed on a tablet screen, but the two texts differ with respect to the kinesthetic feedback they provide. When we read a print book, we can see as well as feel the page-by-page progress through the text. The physicality of paper allows a sense of volume to the substrate, which embodies - literally speaking - the text and reflects its length. Hence, just by a look at the spine, you can immediately see - and feel - whether a book on the shelf is an 800-page long novel, or a 20-page short story. In contrast, when you read on a screen, there is no such correspondence between the physicality of the substrate (screen) and the length and extension of the text embedded therein. We can see, by means of progress bars or other visual indicators (e.g., page numbers), where in the text we are. However, differently from with a book, this exclusively visual feedback is not supported by the associated sensorimotor cues.
This intangibility of the digital text may have implications for cognitive and emotional aspects of reading. For instance, several studies find that people - younger as well as older - still prefer paper over screens, especially when reading longer texts (e.g. Mizrachi et al., 2018). The reasons given for the preference for paper often have to do with tangibility and the tactile quality: People report that the feel of paper helps them focus and concentrate, and that something is missing when they read on a screen. This phenomenon, which Gerlach and Buxmann (2011) called “haptic dissonance,” is found even with younger readers - the so-called “digital natives” for whom screen reading is the new normal.
Moreover, recent research indicates that the missing sensorimotor -kinesthetic - feedback of screens may in fact negatively affect certain cognitive aspects of reading. In a 2019 experiment, my colleagues and I compared the reading of a long (28-page) plot-based story read on a Kindle and on paper in a print pocket book. Matching the surface dimensions of the paper pages to the Kindle display so that the texts looked identical, page-by-page, we assessed participants’ performance on a range of measures targeting factual recall and comprehension. Participants performed equally well on most of the tasks; however, on measures related to their ability to correctly reconstruct the temporality and order of events, those who had read the text in a print pocket book outperformed the Kindle group.
We should of course be cautious when interpreting findings from one single experiment, so replications are needed before we can conclude on this issue. However, it seems justified to claim that the tangibility and kinaesthetic feedback of paper seems to play a role in cognitive - and perhaps even emotional - processes, in part explaining the observed screen inferiority for certain aspects of reading.
“Smell and sight are relevant senses when it comes to reading. But touch may well be the most important,” writes Naomi Baron (2015, p. 142). Hence, future research on reading would do well to broaden the lens, accommodating the vital contributions of our hands, fingers, and embodied minds in the reading process.
For Sources and Further Reading
Baron, N. (2015). Words onscreen: The fate of reading in a digital world.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Delgado, P., Vargas, C., Ackerman, R., and Salmerón, L. (2018). Don’t throw away your printed books: A meta-analysis on the effects of reading media on comprehension. Educational Research Review, 25, 23-38.
Gerlach, J., & Buxmann, P. (2011). Investigating the acceptance of electronic books: The impact of haptic dissonance on innovation adoption. European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) Proceedings. 141.
Kuzmicová, A., Dias, P., Cepic, A. V., Albrechtslund A. B., Casado, A., Topic, M. K.,... Teixeira-Botelho, I. (2018). Reading and company: Embodiment and social space in silent reading practices. Literacy, 52(2), 70-77.
Mangen, A., Olivier, G., & Velay, J. L. (2019). Comparing comprehension of a long text read in print book and on Kindle: Where in the text and when in the story? Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 38.
Mizrachi, D., Salaz, A. M., Kurbanoglu, S., Boustany, J., & ARFIS Research Group (2018). Academic reading format preferences and behaviors among university students worldwide: A comparative survey analysis. PloS one, 13(5), e0197444.
Wolf, M. (2018). Reader, come home: The reading brain in a digital world. New York: Harper.
