Shallow reading refers to social practices in which people acquire information or entertainment quickly from texts, images or other meaningful forms, individual or combination, by using various modern media. Shallow reading as a representational form of
post-modern
Postmodernism encompasses a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism
Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experi ...
mass culture
Popular culture (also called pop culture or mass culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as popular art pop_art.html" ;"title="f. pop art">f. pop artor mass art, somet ...
reflects a transition of expense principle tendency from
print culture
Print culture embodies all forms of printed text and other printed forms of visual communication. One prominent scholar of print culture in Europe is Elizabeth Eisenstein, who contrasted the print culture of Europe in the centuries after the ad ...
towards
visual culture
Visual culture is the aspect of culture expressed in visual images. Many academic fields study this subject, including cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, media studies, Deaf Studies, and anthropology.
The field of vi ...
.
Background
With the continuous update of advanced
media technology and popularization of
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...
, people are stepping into
mobile Internet era. In this process, an obvious change is that traditional reading mode is gradually shifting to shallow reading. The prevalence of shallow reading has attracted attention of media, publishing and
library
A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...
fields.
Features
# Superficial:In order to enable people obtain useful information during the process of quick
browsing
Browsing is a kind of orienting strategy. It is supposed to identify something of relevance for the browsing organism. In context of humans, it is a metaphor taken from the animal kingdom. It is used, for example, about people browsing open sh ...
, the target materials of shallow reading are usually very clear and easy to understand as well as with clear-cut topics.
# Visual: Objectives of shallow reading are often short texts with
illustration
An illustration is a decoration, interpretation, or visual explanation of a text, concept, or process, designed for integration in print and digitally published media, such as posters, flyers, magazines, books, teaching materials, animations, vi ...
s and pictures, or even images and/or video without text captions.
# Recreational:For deep readers, traditional reading is a process of thinking training and a cultivation of
aesthetic
Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and taste, which in a broad sense incorporates the philosophy of art.Slater, B. H.Aesthetics ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,'' , acces ...
culture while shallow reading gets rid of the seriousness of deep reading and mainly aim at facilitating readers
acquire information and entertainment in a relaxing and
interactive
Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but mo ...
atmosphere.
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See also
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References
{{reflist
Reading (process)