The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 (19 page)

When reading on screens, individuals seem less inclined to engage in what psychologists call metacognitive learning regulation—setting specific goals, rereading difficult sections, and checking how much one has understood along the way. In a 2011 experiment at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, college students took multiple-choice exams about expository texts either on computers or on paper. Researchers limited half the volunteers to a meager seven minutes of study time; the other half could review the text for as long as they liked. When under pressure to read quickly, students using computers and paper performed equally well. When managing their own study time, however, volunteers using paper scored about 10 percentage points higher. Presumably, students using paper approached the exam with a more studious attitude than their screen-reading peers and more effectively directed their attention and working memory.

Even when studies find few differences in reading comprehension between screens and paper, screen readers may not remember a text as thoroughly in the long run. In a 2003 study Kate Garland, then at the University of Leicester in England, and her team asked fifty British college students to read documents from an introductory economics course either on a computer monitor or in a spiral-bound booklet. After twenty minutes of reading, Garland and her colleagues quizzed the students. Participants scored equally well regardless of the medium but differed in how they remembered the information.

Psychologists distinguish between remembering something—a relatively weak form of memory in which someone recalls a piece of information, along with contextual details, such as where and when one learned it—and knowing something: a stronger form of memory defined as certainty that something is true. While taking the quiz, Garland's volunteers marked both their answer and whether they “remembered” or “knew” the answer. Students who had read study material on a screen relied much more on remembering than on knowing, whereas students who read on paper depended equally on the two forms of memory. Garland and her colleagues think that students who read on paper learned the study material more thoroughly more quickly; they did not have to spend a lot of time searching their mind for information from the text—they often just knew the answers.

Perhaps any discrepancies in reading comprehension between paper and screens will shrink as people's attitudes continue to change. Maybe the star of
A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work
will grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to lurk among older generations. The latest research suggests, however, that substituting screens for paper at an early age has disadvantages that we should not write off so easily. A 2012 study at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center in New York City recruited thirty-two pairs of parents and three- to six-year-old children. Kids remembered more details from stories they read on paper than ones they read in e-books enhanced with interactive animations, videos, and games. These bells and whistles deflected attention away from the narrative toward the device itself. In a follow-up survey of 1,226 parents, the majority reported that they and their children prefer print books over e-books when reading together.

Nearly identical results followed two studies, described this past September in
Mind, Brain, and Education
, by Julia Parrish-Morris, now at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues. When reading paper books to their three- and five-year-old children, parents helpfully related the story to their child's life. But when reading a then popular electric console book with sound effects, parents frequently had to interrupt their usual “dialogic reading” to stop the child from fiddling with buttons and losing track of the narrative. Such distractions ultimately prevented the three-year-olds from understanding even the gist of the stories, but all the children followed the stories in paper books just fine.

Such preliminary research on early readers underscores a quality of paper that may be its greatest strength as a reading medium: its modesty. Admittedly, digital texts offer clear advantages in many different situations. When one is researching under deadline, the convenience of quickly accessing hundreds of keyword-searchable online documents vastly outweighs the benefits in comprehension and retention that come with dutifully locating and rifling through paper books one at a time in a library. And for people with poor vision, adjustable font size and the sharp contrast of an LCD screen are godsends. Yet paper, unlike screens, rarely calls attention to itself or shifts focus away from the text. Because of its simplicity, paper is “a still point, an anchor for the consciousness,” as William Powers writes in his 2006 essay “Hamlet's Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal.” People consistently report that when they really want to focus on a text, they read it on paper. In a 2011 survey of graduate students at National Taiwan University, the majority reported browsing a few paragraphs of an item online before printing out the whole text for more in-depth reading. And in a 2003 survey at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, nearly 80 percent of 687 students preferred to read text on paper rather than on a screen to “understand it with clarity.”

Beyond pragmatic considerations, the way we feel about a paper book or an e-reader—and the way it feels in our hands—also determines whether we buy a best-selling book in hardcover at a local bookstore or download it from Amazon. Surveys and consumer reports suggest that the sensory aspects of reading on paper matter to people more than one might assume: the feel of paper and ink; the option to smooth or fold a page with one's fingers; the distinctive sound a page makes when turned. So far digital texts have not satisfyingly replicated such sensations. Paper books also have an immediately discernible size, shape, and weight. We might refer to a hardcover edition of Leo Tolstoy's
War and Peace
as a “hefty tome” or to a paperback of Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
as a “slim volume.” In contrast, although a digital text has a length that may be represented with a scroll or progress bar, it has no obvious shape or thickness. An e-reader always weighs the same, regardless of whether you are reading Marcel Proust's magnum opus or one of Ernest Hemingway's short stories. Some researchers have found that these discrepancies create enough so-called haptic dissonance to dissuade some people from using e-readers.

To amend this sensory incongruity, many designers have worked hard to make the e-reader or tablet experience as close to reading on paper as possible. E-ink resembles typical chemical ink, and the simple layout of the Kindle's screen looks remarkably like a page in a paper book. Likewise, Apple's iBooks app attempts to simulate somewhat realistic page turning. So far such gestures have been more aesthetic than pragmatic. E-books still prevent people from quickly scanning ahead on a whim or easily flipping to a previous chapter when a sentence brings to the surface a memory of something they read earlier.

Some digital innovators are not confining themselves to imitations of paper books. Instead they are evolving screen-based reading into something else entirely. Scrolling may not be the ideal way to navigate a text as long and dense as Herman Melville's
Moby-Dick
, but the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, ESPN, and other media outlets have created beautiful, highly visual articles that could not appear in print because they blend text with movies and embedded sound clips and depend entirely on scrolling to create a cinematic experience. Robin Sloan has pioneered the tap essay, which relies on physical interaction to set the pace and tone, unveiling new words, sentences, and images only when someone taps a phone or tablet's touch screen. And some writers are pairing up with computer programmers to produce ever more sophisticated interactive fiction and nonfiction in which one's choices determine what one reads, hears, and sees next.

When it comes to intensively reading long pieces of unembellished text, paper and ink may still have the advantage. But plain text is not the only way to read.

FROM
Harvard Review

 

B
ENEATH THE BLINDING WHITE SKY
, where glaciers calve and crash into the Ross Sea and the land surface of Antarctica begins, there are two isolated huts, the Discovery and the Terra Nova. The Discovery hut was erected in 1902 at the dawn of the age of Antarctic exploration. British Royal Navy Captain Robert F. Scott picked up the prefabricated structure in Melbourne on his way south. No one gave much thought to the wide low-angle roof and broad windows, both designed to dissipate heat in the Australian outback. No one had expected to live in the hut or, in reality, to be stranded there. In desperation, the last inhabitants took to ripping down the ceiling. They burned the rafters, still lanced with nails, in exchange for a few hours of heat. The walls are smoke-stained and jagged.

The Terra Nova hut is 12 miles farther north. It was built in a little over a week nine years later and was used by Scott as the staging center for his second, doomed attempt at the pole. Its walls are double-planked, stuffed with lint and seaweed. It's attached to a set of stables designed for the expedition's nineteen Manchurian ponies, though none of them lasted very long on the ice. The insides of both of these huts remain perfectly intact—not because the structures have been made into museums but because nothing decays in the frigid cold and everything was left. If you go to Antarctica's research station in McMurdo Sound and you wrangle a key and a helicopter ride to Cape Evans, you'll find everything inside the Terra Nova hut just as it was when the members of Scott's party who didn't attempt to get to the pole went running for the ship to take them home. They left their possessions, their papers, even the dog whose skeleton you can still see, bound with a metal collar, on the floor of the doghouse.

These two huts lie near the research station where I spent the coldest summer of my life. I was twenty-six years old and in the middle of my graduate work as a planetary scientist. I went to Antarctica to probe for traces of life beneath the snow of its harsh, clean deserts. Regions of the continent were known for their similarities to Mars, which is why I had come, as an aspiring explorer of that distant planet. But I was also lured to Antarctica by something I'd once read by Edwin Mickleburgh, who wrote in
Beyond the Frozen Sea
that “its overwhelming beauty touches one so deeply that it is like a wound.”

Each day in Antarctica I would rise and don the dozen layers of thermal underwear and goose down I had been issued. I was part of a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation to train young researchers. Some mornings we would snowmobile out over the windblown blue ice, a sledge of equipment fishtailing behind us. On other mornings we would head down to the helipad, hop into an A-Star or Bell 212, and zoom out over the booming pressure ridges. When the pilot reached the edge of the sea ice, one of us had to jump out, the helicopter still hovering, and bore a hole with a 4-inch bit. The ice had to be at least a meter thick; if not, it would buckle beneath us.

Everywhere I went, I lugged a gargantuan survival bag that weighed nearly as much as I did. Inside the waterproof red vinyl flaps were sleeping bags, a tent, and stakes, a WhisperLite stove, two quarts of white gas, a cookset, six freeze-dried meals, six candy bars, two bricks of Mainstay 3600 survival ration, tea bags, cocoa packets, toilet paper, candles, matches, a signal kit, and a standard-issue romance novel to read while waiting to be rescued. I practiced sawing building blocks out of the snow to construct ice walls, survival trenches, and snow caves. I studied the HF radio alphabet:
alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo.
I learned the geometry of crevasses and how never to step near where three cracks crossed, for the ice could give way like a trapdoor.

I also learned about the weather, which was constantly changing. A column of cold air could suddenly sink and roll over the terrain. Within seconds, a completely calm afternoon could be swallowed by katabatic winds howling off the East Antarctic ice sheet. On overcast days, the white clouds could merge with the white snow; the light could become so diffuse that shadows disappeared, making it impossible to judge distances or distinguish the horizon.

Each of us had our own scientific interests: penguins, ciliates, the flapping valves of Antarctic scallops. For me it was the bacterial cells eking out a living in the bleakness of inland Antarctica. I analyzed samples from the Dry Valleys, just across the sound, where no rain has fallen for two million years. There iron oxide minerals, which also tint the surface of Mars, stain the blood-red tongue of a glacier that dips down to the ice-covered surface of a salt lake. I studied Bratina Island, which has all the indicators of land but isn't land at all, just a thick layer of dirt and rocks resting on a layer of ice floating, in turn, upon the sea. Slick mats of green, yellow, and orange cyanobacteria are suspended there like felt in the meltwater ponds, gashes of color against the barren terrain. I investigated all the microbial colonies I could find, trying to understand how pockets of life could survive in the hostile, Mars-like conditions.

Unexpectedly, though, it wasn't the continent's biology that most moved me, or its tumbling crevasses or poleward storms. Or even the remarkable extent to which my inner world flowed out into the landscape. It was those huts built by Scott and his two polar expedition parties. In contrast to the shimmering ice, the world inside them was dark and awful; there were reverberations from the walls, the abandoned tins and boxes, many of them still full. There were bottles of ketchup, tins of cabbage, a gramophone, test tubes, and glass vials with chemical powders. Ruined reindeer boots, man-hauling sled belts, stacked carcasses of seals, the echoes of death.

There's a small library at McMurdo, located between the laundry room and the weight room at the rear of Building 155. It has no windows and about thirty shelves of books. During the light-washed nights, when I couldn't sleep, I would sometimes find myself there, studying the faces of the men who once inhabited those huts. I would curl up on a piece of battered furniture and look through books and photographs archiving the early expeditions. One day I came across the diaries of Edward Wilson, the scientist of the crew. He last saw the Terra Nova hut in late October 1911, when he joined Scott on his final expedition. All five men in the party reached the South Pole only to discover that the Norwegian flag had been planted there a few weeks earlier, and all five men died on the return journey. Wilson collected thirty-five pounds of geologic fossils proving that Antarctica was once covered by ferns. The consummate scientist, he hauled those fossils to the very end.