Reading the Web
Helen Niu
We look through texts, emails, webpages, and posts every day. Over the past decade, the experience of reading has progressively changed from a physical experience on paper to a digital experience on screens. What was once an active and deliberate act has now become a passive encounter. But how do these nonlinear experiences of moving across platforms and mediums create an entirely new reading experience? And are the acts of browsing, watching, and scanning redefining what it means to read?
Reading the Web is a personal reflection and interpretation of the discussion around digital reading brought about by the book I Read Where I Am: Exploring New Information Cultures. Through this project, I am re-interpreting a common web essay format into a curated digital experience by using my reflection text as the common narrative and navigation. By interacting with links that reveal digital references and reading across different online platforms, the reader gains awareness of the overall website narrative and their own digital journeys that are often overlooked.
The site utilizes default design systems found around the web in order to showcase the real world context of how we practice digital reading today. Additionally, this project serves as an archive of how we read on the web in order to highlight how digital reading has and will change; just as the reading experience has expanded from the physical reading of books.