Book or screen, pen or keyboard? A cross-cultural sociological analysis of writing and reading habits basing on Germany, Italy and the UK
Introduction
In the last decade, digital media have reconfigured the entire media landscape and come to play a crucial role in contemporary culture and society. Especially in the Western world, everyday life has become digital and online, and devices like the landline telephone or desktop computer are changing to mobile media devices. Insofar as where the Internet access is possible, smartphones and laptops can be used in all contexts, for example at home, work, or at school. It seems that paper and pencil are increasingly being replaced by screen and keyboard. The widespread presence of digital technologies is modifying the way in which people share, consume and create knowledge, affecting significantly the development of our social, cultural and educational competences. However, the impact of digital technologies on writing and reading within the educational context has not been analyzed widely. A recent significant exception is represented by the qualitative study conducted by Fortunati and Vincent (2014) about the use of digital media (laptop, computer) and analog media (paper and pencil) by Italian students. They detected that “reading and writing competencies are changing with the use of digital technologies but that paper and digital interactions are not mutually exclusive” (Fortunati and Vincent, 2014, p. 39). Using pen or keyboard is dependent on the task: students prefer to write longer texts digitally while pen and paper are seen as more useful for creative tasks and meta-communication.
Going one-step further, we chose three European countries namely Germany, Italy and United Kingdom, which have relatively similar economic, social and education systems, to investigate the question: what similarities and differences of writing and reading habits exist between these different countries? In the next section, we provide a brief literature review on the impact of digital media on reading/writing practices. In the following section, we present a broad picture of the current status of media usage in Germany, Italy and UK, focusing in particular on the adoption of the Internet and e-books. We then describe the research questions, data collection and samples and provide an overview of our approach. The main findings of the study are illustrated, followed by discussion and concluding remarks as well as suggested direction for future research.
Section snippets
Literature review
Although the design and features of media suggest certain practices, many studies about the appropriation of digital media into everyday life practices provides a more detailed analysis: people integrate and adapt media to their requirements. As an example, instant messaging was developed for communication within a business context; now, it is a common tool for daily communication (Harper, 2010) and an exemplar of “social shaping of technology” is postulated by Williams and Edge (1996) (see
Country-specific media use: An overview
Looking at media usage in Germany 2013, it is notable that 79.1% of the German speaking population older than 14 years is using the Internet (van Eimeren and Frees, 2014, p. 378). Besides stationary digital media like the personal computer (76%) more than half of the German online households also possess online-capable mobile media like a laptop (74%) or a smartphone (56%). Currently, the diffusion of tablets and e-book-readers is lower than 20% but, compared to the previous year, it has
Methods
This article takes the study of Fortunati and Vincent (2014) as the basis to explore cross-cultural similarities and differences concerning writing and reading habits of students. Their research design has been replicated in Germany, UK and a second time in Italy. Therefore, the implemented study not only provides data for a cross-cultural analysis, but also – because of the follow-up data collection in Italy – a validation of the findings of Fortunati and Vincent (2014) related to the writing
Results
The results are organized in two sections. In the first one (Section 5.1), an integrated view on the most significant findings emerged from the analysis of German, Italian and British questionnaires is presented. In the second section (Section 5.2), following the order of presentation in Fortunati and Vincent (2014), four sub-sections are created to specifically address the findings related to (1) writing on paper; (2) writing on a keyboard; (3) reading on paper, and (4) reading on screen. The
Discussion and conclusion
The purpose of this paper was to investigate the cross-cultural similarities and differences in the adoption of reading and writing technologies as well as the reading and writing habits among German, Italian and UK students.
Our overview of country-specific media use shows that the adoption of reading and writing technologies varies between countries. Ownership of laptops among young people is quite consistent between the three countries. However, with regards to the use of PC (desktop),
Acknowledgments
This article is basing on the research activities within the COST Action FPS 1104 “New Possibilities for Print and Media Packaging: Combining Print with Digital” (May 2012 – May 2016). Special thanks to Dr. Jane Vincent for her precious supervision and proofreading.
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