A Transformed Routine
During my holidays in Ibiza a few years ago, I had a routine that fascinated me. After bathing in the sea every morning, I went to the village to buy the necessary products and, especially, to look for the press. In the village bookstore, every day he received, in a discreet way on occasions, the few copies that arrived from the Peninsula. This is what happens when you live on an island: the goods arrive depending on the sea conditions. With the newspapers under his arm, he would buy the bread and return home to read the press for a few hours very calmly. Only during the holidays did he enjoy reading in this way. He reviewed the chronicles until the end. Everything started to change when my house, located between the sea and the mountains, was connected to the Internet. The house, which used to be isolated from everything and everyone, where sending a message on a mobile phone was almost impossible, became a house connected to a wifi network. From that moment on, I no longer needed to go and buy the newspaper, or even the bread, because they also brought it to me if I ordered it online.
The Transformation of Reading
The daily reading of newspapers changed radically. Through the tablet screen, the reading was no longer the same. Informing myself online got me used to reading in a different way. Now I was quickly selecting and discarding the headlines on each screen. When I started reading with the tablet, I noticed a different relationship with reading: when reading an article, I was pressured to get to the key point quickly, it made me nervous. As I read, I was worried about whether I was close to finishing the article or still halfway through. Before, in front of a printed page, you could see at a glance the length of the article; not now
The Retention Capacity
There has been an experiment that has revealed that people understand and remember less what they read through screens. Faced with this, I wonder: are we losing the ability to retain what we read? Are we also losing the ability to read long texts? This is an unknown that only time will reveal to us.
