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Re:Why digital natives prefer reading in print by gglitch on Tuesday February 24, 2015 @12:07PM (#9101916)
In my unstudied and ill-informed opinion, computers and the internet have trained many of us to view intellectual content as more abstracted from the physical experience of ingesting it than it really is, as though the ideal of reading would actually be telepathy from writer to reader, and anything added to that signal chain must be by definition noise. I don't know if I totally buy that view though. I sympathize with the students who focus better with print; I do too - and I take better notes when I write by hand. I don't think that's because I'm anachronistic; I think it's because of some fundamental aspect of being both a mind and a body.
Re:Why digital natives prefer reading in print by agumonkey on Tuesday February 24, 2015 @02:16PM (#9102828)
Exactly. We're more and more going away from analog, physical interactions directly to the symbolic / upper brain. But I deeply believe that the best path to symbolic abstraction is from real to ideal. Skipping the first seems an optimization but it's denying the machine on which the program runs, and is detrimental in the end. Unless you do advanced maths, then your brain is used to go directly to abstract ideas through highly compressed communication forms in signs.