Hyper reading alters brain structure in ways pedagogy ignores.

Evidence

Learning to read complex texts (i.e. ‘close reading’) has long been seen as the special province of the humanities, and humanities scholars pride themselves on knowing how to do it well and how to teach students to do it. With the advent of digital media, other modes of reading are claiming an increasing share of what counts as ‘literacy’, including hyper reading and analysis through machine algorithms (‘machine reading’). 17 Hyper reading, often associated with reading on the web, has also been shown to bring about cognitive and morphological changes in the brain. Young people are at the leading edge of these changes, but pedagogical strategies have not to date generally been fashioned to take advantage of these changes. Students read and write print texts in the classroom and consume and create digital texts of their own on screens (with computers, iPhones, tablets, etc.), but there is little transfer from leisure activities to classroom instruction and vice versa. A Comparative Media Studies perspective can result in courses and curricula that recognize all three reading modalities – close, hyper, and machine – and prepare students to understand the limitations and affordances of each. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 422

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the key taxonomy of reading modalities — close, hyper, and machine reading — that the rest of the chapter builds on as the core concept of comparative media studies.
• XREF: The close/hyper/machine reading triad echoes the attention-taxonomy move of the whole book, and connects to the earlier chapters’ pluralization of attention forms. — connects to: Intensive learning physically rewires brain structure and perceptual habits.; Reading transforms both its object and the reader when practiced critically — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 396; A generational shift from deep attention to hyper-attention is underway — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 46 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Intensive learning physically rewires brain structure and perceptual habits. #corroborates (0.85)
• Rapid reading and advertising skimming reflect a broader erosion of sustained attention #corroborates (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 647
• A generational shift from deep attention to hyper-attention is underway #corroborates (0.80) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 46
• Reading transforms both its object and the reader when practiced critically #expands (0.78) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 396