Critics of reading on the internet say they see no evidence that increase web ac

Question

Critics of reading on the internet say they see no evidence that increase web activity improves reading achievement. What we are loosing in this country and presumable around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading, said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. " I would believe people who tell me that the internet develops reading if I did no see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests." Question: On your on words, what does this quote mean? Do you agree or disagree? it is an english question

Explanation / Answer

I do agree that the increase in web activity won't improve reading achievement.

The first part of what Mr. Gioia said states that there is no proof that the increase in web activity improves the reading capabilities of people. In online/virtual reading, we are losing the focused, sustained(reading without interruptions).

There are various number of things(links,sites) that you need to go through to get the required information from the web. At times you won't be able to get all the content from one place. The major problem with reading something online is that the number of interruptions that can occur. If you consider reading comprehensions from a book, there won't be any other interruptions while reading and you will be more focused . The following are some of the attributes that differentiates the reading from a book and from the web.
1) Speed - As most of the experiments suggets the probability of reading certain contents/comprehension faster is more from a book not from the web.
2) Accuracy - The accuracy or the correctness of reading content from the book and from the web. People do read more accurately from a book when the normal book and the web are considered . But when you have the hypertext and all which can highlight the text and apply various transformations of text it will be difficult to choose between the two.
3) Fatigue - There is not a huge difference between reading from books and from the web when fatigue is considered. But it can cause a long time problems when people use average VDUs.

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