My first impression of this reading was that it cast a pretty ominous cloud on predicting the future of reading and critical interpretation. Seemingly, people are becoming lazy readers, and the argument is that technology is affecting the reading abilities of younger generations. This criticism is one I face in my academic/professional life – people want to see a design portfolio with more images and less text; obviously, it’s important to be able to story tell visually, but can images ever fully convey what we wish to communicate without the aid of words? Furthermore, when it comes to designing for mobile interfaces, designers understand that users do not read text. It’s a tough situation when a mobile app screen with both image and text ends up being too much text for young users (who ignore the text), and not enough text for older users (who wish there was more).

Yet, there are always criticisms when things change from the norm. Just because people are reading differently in a different age doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a downhill path for reading – reading can be taught in a way to account for the rise of technology and increase in new media and methods for digital reading. For example, I’ve been in classrooms where students were taught to read the page of a book line-by-line using their index finger to point as to not lose their place in the page. This technique was pretty specific to print reading, but new kinds of techniques can be created and taught in terms of digital reading; the rise of digital reading doesn’t have to mean the end to close reading. Maybe tools like a more robust version of the TopicGraph tool can help to augment digital reading environments with keyword searching, or can even can aid users in learning and understanding something through key word indexation. All hope is not necessarily lost :)