(648 words)
A few years ago, I made a discovery while reading a book on my Kindle tablet. The Kindle was easily my favorite out of all the many devices I owned at the time, because it allowed me to carry a library of books in my purse, and because I found myself reading significantly faster when I used it. I was reading John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. I finished the book, heartstrings well and truly tugged, turned off my Kindle and realized I couldn’t remember how the book had started. This was new for me. I knew Hazel had gone at least a chapter or so before Augustus announced his fear of oblivion and caught her eye, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what had happened. I struggled to remember the sections of dialogue I had loved and the lines that I had read a second time, sometimes out loud, just because they were so beautiful. It wasn’t a question of me being bored by the book or not liking it enough to remember it. I was just drawing a complete blank on small things I usually remember after I finish reading.
Puzzled by this, I checked over the other books in my Kindle library. I could remember why I loved these books. I could recount their stories well enough to recommend them or rave about them, but not nearly as much as I used to be able to. I can retell the events of the first few chapters of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone even though I (shamefully) haven’t reread it in years, and yet I couldn’t give a detailed summary of the plots of most of the digital books I owned. So what was going on here?
I stewed over this issue for several months as I continued to read on my Kindle and the handy Kindle app on my phone. I came to the following, self-formulated hypothesis: reading on an electronic device greatly decreased my ability to retain what I had read.
Jackie Young of OCAD University in Toronto conducted a study on this exact topic in 2014. This study consisted of a group of college students reading articles from several reputable newspapers, including The Economist and The New Yorker, in both print and online formats. While it was eventually concluded that subjects had equal retention in both forms, it was noted that the participants found printed sources to be more trustworthy than those published online. Young also observed that the students found the process of scrolling through an online article uninteresting and that readers interacted differently with the two kinds of sources. It’s not a stretch to say that while the results of this article don’t directly support my little theory, it did raise some interesting questions about the way we read, and what impacts that can have on us as learners and consumers of information.
Don’t take this as a knock on electronic reading. I still consume the majority of the books I read through my phone, and the Kindle app is one of the most used apps I have. If I’m sitting on my phone somewhere, and I look like I’m scrolling through a feed of some kind, the chances that I’m actually reading are very high. I just can’t remember what in the world I read. I have chosen to remedy this problem, for the time being, by reverting to reading paper books as often as possible. However, I’ve become accustomed to the constant presence and accessibility of my phone and the entertainment it provides, so tackling a physical book often seems daunting, and takes me a longer time. Maybe that’s just the price we have to pay to be able to remember that “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
Jackie Young, (2014) “A study of print and computer-based reading to measure and compare rates of comprehension and retention”, New Library World, Vol. 115 Issue: 7/8, pp.376-393, https://doi.org/10.1108/NLW-05-2014-0051
Meghan McGowan 