Joan Vinall-Cox :: Blog :: Reading Changes - Useful Reading

Useful reading is just that - reading used to accomplish something else. Reading a manual, where you are trying to learn how to do something, for example.

chapters.indigo.ca: Web Sites Do-It-Yourself For Dummies: Janine C. Warner: Books via kwout

Or perhaps reading on a screen to decide whether a certain book is the one you need to help you do whatever.  

Recipes were probably one of the earliest forms of useful reading, and business reports are probably one of the most prevalent today. Reading for information to help you make decisions about what actions you will take is essential in today's word, which is why illiteracy is so limiting. However we are, I believe, in what Walter Ong called Secondary Orality, a society where although "based permanently on the use of writing and print” (Ong, 1982, p.136) much of our communication is casual and repetitive, whether oral or text.

• secondary orality is a type of interpersonal communication that is neither classically oral nor literate, and has been made possible entirely through modern communication technologies. This communication is now instantaneous, so despite its use of the written word, it allows for transactions to be nearly as cyclical as orality; thoughts and ideas are repeated and revisited several times, instead of simply being stated once, as in literacy. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_orality 

I believe that literacy will continue to be important, but I also see that just as movies and tv have usurpted some of the space formerly occupied by lyrical reading, especially narrative space, so the web is taking over some of the "useful reading" space. Take a look at sites such as VideoJug. where recipes, among other things, can be shown, not just described. Being literate would help, but much of the useful information can be derived from seeing and listening. The strongest, IMHO, tutorials on the web make limited use of text, especially extended text. For example, this tutorial on gMail - http://www.google.com/mail/help/tour/indexStart.html  or this explanation of what a wiki is - http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english use text, and reading, in a limited way, almost as a back-up to the visual. The addition of the visual is reducing the need for as much text, and, in fact, is part of a trend of reducing over text use in favour of visuals. Jakob Nielsen's advice in writing for the web - http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/ shows the current tendancy in text. Reading is moving from linear to scan and spot, and the screen is reinforcing that tendancy.

So, in this rather unorganized freewrite, what am I trying to say? I am saying that reading is changing, because of the web, but also because of movies, tv and radio. And the changes are interesting and have both positive and negative aspects. Something is being lost, but there are people who will benefit. As a brief and final example, I could imagine a seriously dyslexic person composing an essay using a camera, their voice and VoiceThreads - http://voicethread.com/#home