New media literacy: Page break and screen break as new strategies of reading

Abstract

The paper examines the influence of new technologies and media on the book, seen both as printed text and screen structure, as a teaching aid and the constituent part of literary canon. The blurred boundary between the screen and the print clarifies the fact that screen break and page break demand diverse reading strategies: requiring the particular focus, print presents the reader with monovalent information, while screen makes the reader's attention diffused, offering a dazzling array of sources but not the reliability of information. The cultures of print and screen are further divided owing to different attitudes towards new information technologies, defined by Susan Greenfield as webophoria, webophilia and webophobia. While webophobia springs from eternal human fear that illusion might at a certain moment irretrievably erase the truth, webophoria fails to see that the media structure of the Internet changes is irrevocably as well: it has moved from a democratic institution of polilogue towards a commodified dimension of monologue.