2. Skimming

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This brings me to a correlative aspect of hyper-reading—less of the text is actually read. The proportion of read text to un-read but available text is astronomical. Surfing the Web is “skimming” on a global scale. One might be tempted to think of this as a problem. In print environments there are contexts in which we tend to believe that one SHOULD read ALL of a stretch of text. Some readers (e.g., teachers) worry about other readers (e.g., students) who do not read all of the text. Conversely, some scholars brag that they have read “all” of Shakespeare or Milton or James Joyce. Obversely, persons sometimes confess that they read only the beginning of the book, or worse, only the ending. Yet skimming is an essential reading act.

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The following anecdote suggests the usefulness of skimming in a print environment. I recall being jealous of a colleague whose questions at the end of every guest lecture implied that he had read the lecturer’s most recent books. I never seemed to find the time. Then I realized that he skimmed them. By contrast, I was saddled with readerly guilt when I skimmed a book; I felt that I had not read it, even though when I read the whole book, after a few months I only remembered its bare outlines. I felt less guilty, however, when I was working on an article and found hundreds of potentially relevant essays in innumerable journals and skimmed them to find only the information relevant to the issue I was discussing. Yet, to this day I have a compulsion to read every word of a printed book I begin to read. Perhaps I enjoy the Web because I feel less guilty surfing it for particular topics and reading only “at the surface.”

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When we consider the popularity of hypertexts, skimming takes on a whole new dimension. Hypertexts are designed for skimmers.¹² If you were to skim a printed book, you would probably look first at its table of contents, then its index and its bibliography, afterward read its introduction and its conclusion, and toward the end turn to an interesting chapter or pursue a conceptual thread or two Hypertexts, like proposals, are designed so that such intelligent skimming is the norm which helps readers who have too much to read.

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Permit me to end this section with another digression: I have always been astonished by the academic task of “keeping up with one’s field” associated with the ideal of achieving expertise. One fatal summer when I decided I would not teach but catch up on my reading, I put together a modest reading list of books on literary theory. Anxious to keep up a reading routine that would insure getting through the list, I made the mistake of calculating the number of pages to be read and the number of hours of available reading time. When I matched these calculations to a sensible reading speed, I discovered that I could barely get through half the list and then only if I read at breakneck speed on an uninterrupted schedule. I should have skimmed them but I didn’t. When Fall arrived all too soon, I went back to pecking as my customary school year mode of reading.