(1) James Sosnoski

As time progresses, technology will make the majority of books and printed media accessible through the use of a computer, and this prospect both excites me and worries me. I like the idea that our natural resources will be better conserved, but the changes technology brings to printed material continues to be met with positive and negative responses. Luckily, James Sosnoski has a remedy for this situation. In this article, he argues that “public listservs more often stage performances of their discussants than meaningfully contribute to our understanding of the issues under discussion”, whose end result is a large amount of information with little relevant meaning on the internet. To combat this problem, he introduces the term “hyper-reading”, which is a process in which the reader uses several different reading techniques (like filtering, skimming, or pecking) and employs them to help the reader pick out the meaning out of a long passage. The aforementioned practices were once ones that Sosnoski himself taught his students never to use, believing that a student couldn’t get meaning out of a passage if used. He has since then encouraged students to use the practices to help with their computer reading.