Are screens changing the way we read and think?

This month I met Anne Mangen in Prague at a meeting organised by EDRLab as part of the ThinkPub project. She is a professor at the University of Stavanger’s Norwegian Reading Centre  and an international authority in the field of reading research. It was inevitable that we would converse over lunches and dinners about football and…reading.

Over the past few years, Mangen and I have shared experiences in a European working group that seeks to understand the links between reading and analytical thinking as well as their consequences for democratic coexistence. One of the most pressing issues we’ve observed in societies that once enjoyed a widespread and healthy relationship with reading is, on the one hand, a decline in the proportion of people who read for leisure and the amount of time they dedicate to reading, and on the other hand, a certain drop in reading skills. How can we shed some light on this issue? How can we explain the impact of screens and digital media on reading skills?

Anne said to me: “A simple, but important distinction in my view, is the impact of the screen as a reading substrate on the one hand, and the impact of digital technologies as environments for engaging with texts as well as other types of information and entertainment, in which multitasking and potential distractions are the key factors. The substrate issue is about the differences between… reading a linear text- say, a short story- on a tablet compared to reading it in a print book. The digital environment issue is about how the numerous digital platforms and the extent of our interaction with them, prime our attention, perceptual and cognitive engagement with various types of texts”.

Anne Mangen, who has been researching reading, informed by embodied and distributed cognition theories, examines how digital technologies shape the cognitive and experiential dimensions of reading. Through empirical studies, she investigates how different reading interfaces affect processes such as reading comprehension and narrative engagement across a variety of text types. She served as Chair of COST Action E-READ (Evolution of Reading in the Age of Digitisation) and is a member of a government-appointed expert committee on screen use.

As our conversation progressed, I found this distinction particularly helpful because it separates two levels of analysis that are often conflated in public debates about digital reading. The first concerns the material characteristics of the reading medium itself, while the second addresses the broader cognitive consequences of sustained engagement with digital environments: “The substrate issue is a narrower discussion of differences between the affordances of a screen display- whether a laptop, tablet, or smart phone- and the affordances of paper, and how these may affect, for instance, reading comprehension. The digital environment issue broadens this scope, focusing on how our increasing exposure to digitally mediated “texts”- usually, short snippets of audiovisuals in which plain textual information may have a minor, if any, role- prime our focus, concentration, cognitive load, and ability to endure cognitively challenging tasks such as engaging with static texts, in reading, over an extended period of time”. 

She added that “Given that most of what we engage with on screens, in particular smart phones, are snippets of quickly moving audiovisuals, the question whether, how and to what extent this affects our and children’s, teenagers’, young adults’ ability to concentrate and engage in challenging and time-demanding cognitive tasks and sustained mental effort, is urgent”.

There is no doubt that the trend observed in various countries – such as Scandinavia – of restriction or concern regarding the impact of digital devices on reading skills is spreading throughout other regions. Anne links this trend to “the sharp decline in the results on the large-scale, international reading (and math) tests such as PIRLS (for 5th graders) and PISA (for 10th graders).”

When I asked Anne Mangen about the importance of printed books in terms of the experience and meaning of reading, she emphasized “The links between long-form reading and mental health; and the fundamental importance of the ability to engage with complex and multifaceted textual information, for engaged and informed citizens on which healthy democracies depend. See the Ljubljana Manifesto on Higher-Level Reading Skills for more on these issues: https://readingmanifesto.org/”.