<divclass="card"><DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT><divclass="mw-parser-output"><h1><spanclass="mw-headline"id="human_reading">human reading</span><spanclass="mw-editsection"><spanclass="mw-editsection-bracket">[</span><ahref="/mw-mediadesign/index.php?title=User:Simon/Human_reading&action=edit&section=1"title="Edit section: human reading">edit</a><spanclass="mw-editsection-bracket">]</span></span></h1>
<p>see also<ahref="Technologising_the_word.html"title="User:Simon/Technologising the word">technologising the word</a>
</p><p>There are many different reasons why you might read something, but essentially, reading involves skimming (reading to get the main idea of a text) or scanning (looking for specific information in details). This often happens in tandem—skimming the catalogue to see what the interest of the library is, and then scanning to see if a particular text has been included—and has relations to other modes of information retrieval, e.g. browsing/searching.
</p><p>In 1977, while facing a skeptical audience in a Q & A session broadcast live on Australian television, Marshall McLuhan argued “the word read means to guess – look it up in the big dictionary. Reading is an activity of rapid guessing because any word has so many meanings – including the word reading – that to select one in a context of other words requires very rapid guessing. That’s why a good reader tends to be a very quick decision-maker.”<supclass="reference"id="cite_ref-1"><ahref="#cite_note-1">[1]</a></sup> This is very true of human reading, where multiple interpretations lead to various equivalent understandings of a text, but false when applied to machine reading, which only operates with predefined ways of interpreting text.
</p><p>Image: "the word read means to guess" A quote from Marshall McLuhan during a live television broadcast, 1977
<liid="cite_note-1"><spanclass="mw-cite-backlink"><ahref="#cite_ref-1">↑</a></span><spanclass="reference-text">McLuhan, M., Available at <aclass="external free"href="https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/acute-abstruse-things-marshall-mcluhan-said-in-australia-in-1977/"rel="nofollow">https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/acute-abstruse-things-marshall-mcluhan-said-in-australia-in-1977/</a></span>
