What is the impact of reading digital text? It has a different character. "Skimming and jumping around from place to place within text is not limited to online reading, this type of reading appears to be the most common type of reading online." And it may have a different impact. "The process of reading on screen tends to be cognitively different from the process of reading on paper, in terms of brain activation, the contextual environment, cognitive focus, comprehension, and reading speed." But maybe the largest impact is on what happens when we are not thinking about reading. "Maryanne Wolf pointed out that 'the mysterious, invisible gift of time to think beyond is the reading brain's greatest achievement' ... By its ability to become virtually automatic, literacy allowed the individual reader to give less time to initial decoding processes and to allocate more cognitive time and ultimately more cortical space to the deeper analysis of recorded thought." In other words, we have to be more explicit about our reading practice when reading online, for various reasons (such as the nature of digital text, the volume of information, or the paratext) and this changes what we think about what we are reading.
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