Why Paper Is Eternal - Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press ...

Though reading is one of the flow activities most often cited by his
subjects, Csikszentmihalyi doesn’t devote much of the book to it. But then, he
doesn’t have to. Every reader knows the bliss of getting lost in a book, or for
that matter any print medium that is read with sustained attention and interest.
Immersing oneself in a good magazine or newspaper is a reliable route to flow’s
“merciful oblivion.” 84 But what about the relatively new kind of reading that is
done online using various kinds of screens? Flow was published in 1990, when
the Internet was in its infancy. Sellen and Harper’s The Myth of the <strong>Paper</strong>less Office
revealed some of the shortcomings of screen-based reading, but research for
that book was also conducted in the early years of the Web, and it was limited
to work-related activities. In the last decade, digital reading has become a part
of everyday life, yet it hasn’t replaced reading on paper.
McDonald says that at the moment screens are not used predominantly
for flow-style reading – settling in and losing one’s bearings – but for a kind of
high-intensity foraging. “When one is reading on the screen, it’s sort of like
speed reading, information-retrieval mode. ‘I’m looking for something. Now
I’m looking for something else.’ It’s very purposeful, it’s very utilitarian. . . .
There’s something about it being on the screen that signals to people to hurry.
It’s pushing the page-down button, just having your finger on the clicker and
scrolling. It’s a higher speed, more nervous kind of thing.” Screen-based
reading, he says, is “very much about ‘search and destroy.’” 85
In other words, because of the way the digital medium interacts with the
human body and brain, it serves different purposes from those served by paper,
and those purposes correspond to different states of mind. One might even say
each has its own preferred kind of content. Perhaps the medium is the
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