Text on the screen
1. Text on the screen
The physical qualities of on-screen text are clearly different from those of text on paper. These differences have significance for readers’ and writers’ experiences of text. We have investigated students’ activity as they com- posed short essays; once from sources presented on A4 paper, and once from sources presented on a computer screen (Dymott and Crook 2001 [b]). The computer screen constituted a smaller working space than the physical desk top. Accordingly, while whole pages of paper text would be made visible at any one time, the screen typically displayed much less than a single page. The participants in our observations often laid out paper so that more than one document was visible at any time. Only one participant attempted this with on-screen texts, and accomplished it only with great difficulty. Indeed, most manipulations of documents were more readily performed on paper than on screen: paper offered a far more ‘direct’ (Hutchins, Hollan and Norman 1986) form of manipulation. Scrolling within a document typically involved a pause in reading while visual attention was shifted to an on-screen scroll bar. Yet the tactile properties of pages meant that they could be turned without distracting visual attention from reading. Numerous such differences between paper and screen have been associated with different experiences of paper and computer texts in both laboratory studies (Hansen and Haas 1988) and anecdotal reports (Chandler 1995). One of the more reliable findings from all lines of research is that users of on-screen writing have greater difficulty apprehending a document’s global structure or developing what Hansen and Haas (1988) call a ‘sense of text’ – a ‘grasp of the structural and semantic arrangement of the text – the absolute and relative location of each topic and the amount of space devoted to each’ (p. 1084). Hansen and Haas (1988) offer a framework to explain such findings in terms of the ‘page size’, ‘legibility’, ‘responsiveness’, and ‘tangibility’ of paper and on-screen texts.
It would be wrong-headed to expect the computer screen’s physicality to influence literacy practices consistently across individuals. A sup- posedly ‘given’ task may be performed quite differently by different individuals who have their own idiosyncratic ways of accomplishing it. The participants in our screen/paper comparative writing task had previously taken part in a more naturalistic study documenting how they produced a genuine coursework essay. In the genuine coursework situation, they differed quite substantially from each other in how they worked with source materials. In our comparative situation, many of these differences were preserved. Participants constructed different roles for source texts, in line with their established reading practices. What mattered about the materiality of the sources was therefore different for each participant: it depended on the specific roles sources played in their writing practices. For one participant, the technologies ‘influenced’ per- formance by facilitating or interfering with her established practice of
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skim-reading and moving frequently between documents. For another participant, the technologies ‘influenced’ performance by facilitating or interfering with his established practice of visiting each document only once and reading it thoroughly from beginning to end. Whether or not the screen ‘inhibits’ or ‘facilitates’ a writer’s use of text sources, depends heavily on the way any individual, with their own history of practice, performs that task.
Having acknowledged that the influence of the computer screen is contingent upon each individual’s shaping of activity, we now suggest the notion that the screen, through its material properties, also itself shapes activity. A number of participants in our study used paper sources quite differently from those presented on screen. They tended to take notes from on-screen documents, and to refer to these notes, not to the texts themselves, when composing. Yet they tended to take no notes from documents available on paper. Rather they highlighted or annotated them, and returned to them throughout writing. Participants typically cited aspects of the materiality of each medium – such as those mentioned above – as reasons for adopting different practices with each medium. Material differences between the two media then, helped shape very different forms of practice and, therefore, different experiences of the texts.
Technology then, can best be understood not as a static influence on literacy practice, but as a dynamic contributor to it. What matters about a technology – the affordances and constraints associated with it – are not properties of the technology per se, but emerge only from its relation with the person (and with the rest of the setting) in activity. Furthermore, these affordances and constraints do not simply influence how smoothly or problematically pre-given literacy practices will proceed: they actually shape the practices themselves. Individuals and computers are involved in complex transactions that shape literacy activities.