Critical Reading in a Screen Paradigm

Abstract

An important step in teaching critical reading for online civic reasoning is building teachers’ own acceptance of and comfort with screen literacies, understanding them not as alternative to gold-standard book literacies but as normative. To do so, teachers must better understand how web-based texts, and the reading of them, differ from the “classical” critical reading most teachers are used to. This article examines the “quantum” nature of web-based texts—their fundamental instability, their reader constructedness, and their nature as processes rather than objects—and relates these features to hyper-reading and other reading strategies that research shows allow engaged readers to screen-read critically.