Why Can't a Screen Be More Like a Page?

Abstract

Why Can't a Screen Be More Like a Page? Jill Allyn Rosser (bio) I remember a particular moment from my childhood with the sharpness of 4K Ultra HD. It was late November. My toys felt old. My friends were home eating things with sugar in them (not on the menu at our house) or being teased by their amusing brothers (we had none of those either). I wanted to play something with someone. But my six-year-old big sister had recently learned to read. She was staring into a book silently mouthing words at it, as if she were in conversation with a wild creature in a secret cave. My parents were also reading intently, but their lips didn't move. The living room had suddenly become a world I wasn't allowed to inhabit fully. I could walk through it, I could sit down on the fuzzy blue chair, I could pull on the string that made the curtains slide back and forth, I could roll over on the rug. But things invisible to me were going on. I demanded very loudly (to be heard over whatever voices they were in thrall to) that someone teach me to read. Immediately there issued forth assurances meant to induce tractability and resignation: it would be too hard for you right now, honey; you're not old enough, but in two years you'll be six, you'll be in first grade. Two years? When everybody knew that Christmas was a month away and even one month would be unendurable. This hour was insupportable. Fortunately, my sister was proud enough of her new skills that she was, with uncharacteristic magnanimity, happy to teach me. She was confident this would prove another triumph of her superior seniority when I couldn't do it; or if by some fluke I did manage ultimately to read, I certainly wouldn't be able to keep up with her. So thanks to, [End Page 596] on her side, a grandly supercilious mutation of altruism, and on mine, an obstinacy sharpened by exclusion resentment, I learned to read at the age of four, with the ferocious focus and ambition other kids were applying to tree-climbing, jump rope moves, and two-wheeling. I realize that four-year-old readers are far from uncommon now, given the plethora of educational programs on television and preschool facilities that emphasize learning to read. But in 1961 I was viewed as something of a prodigy. It was also the first thing I was good at. Perhaps this is why I became so passionately devoted to the printed page so early on—not only because it was my ticket out of boredom or tense social and/or physical situations (being one of only two girls in the neighborhood, and being the less athletically inclined of those two)—but also because it was my platform of distinction. I was not exactly revered by my kindergarten classmates, but I was pointed at. First- and second-grade teachers trotted me into their classrooms to read aloud to their students, I suppose to inspire them into competitive literacy. But that was just a bonus; the experience of opening a new book and diving into its first paragraph was an easily attained high I never tired of. My family's biweekly trips to the county library were the most exhilarating experiences of my childhood summers: I would literally catch my breath when we rounded the final curve and that long, low, brick building appeared, more majestic to me than a Disney palace. And now? Every time I walk into my university's library, I still can't suppress my queasiness upon finding, in place of the traditional broad wooden tables with students bent intently over books, banks of computers that spread as far as the eye can see. When classes are in session, one has to engage in a tacit game of musical chairs (musical since everyone's wearing AirPods) to gain access to one of these computers, though there are hundreds of them. Wandering through the stacks on the other floors, one sees students quietly working at tables and carrels, but beside the books their...