Reading the Screen: How Digital Texts Work

Imagine you are reading the same article about climate change in two places: a printed magazine and a news website. The words might be identical — but your experience as a reader is completely different. On the website you can click a word to find out what it means, watch an embedded video, share the article, or tap a link that takes you somewhere else entirely. Here is a question to get you thinking: when you are reading a digital text, are you always reading it in the same order as the writer intended? Think about the last time you clicked a hyperlink mid-article. Where did it take you — and did you ever come back?