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Active Reading
Active reading is a process or technique of actively engaging with the text we are reading. Often, we read passively—that is, we take in the information we read without questioning its validity and without making personal connections with the text. When we passively read, we do not gain as much from our reading as when we actively read.
Why Actively Read?
In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr claims deep reading is tied to deep thinking. If this claim is true, then moving beyond surface level readings in a way that truly engages with the text can help us develop our abilities to think more clearly and more intelligently about a topic and about the world in which we live. Additionally, active reading, as opposed to the passive reading we do when skimming items or reading for pleasure, can help us
- Save time because we pay more attention to what we read the first time and do not waste time rereading.
- Prepare us for exams because we gain a more in-depth knowledge of the material.
- Stay informed about a subject that interests us.
- Develop exposure to new ideas or have familiar concepts reinforced.
- Create a deeper understanding of life’s complexities.
- Achieve intellectual growth.
Goals of Active Reading
When we read actively, we try to understand the text thoroughly by reading slowly and carefully, pausing to question a main idea or to reexamine a passage that confuses us, and interpreting the larger meanings and implications of the text we’re reading. We try to keep our minds actively thinking about what the text means. In general, active reading allows us to
- Capture main ideas, key concepts, and details of reading.
- Target, reduce, and distill the needed information from the text.
- Engage with the text by making connections with our own knowledge and lives.
- Ask questions that help us think deeper about the content.
Strategies for Active Reading
Many techniques can help us read more actively. Here are a few of the main ones:
- Start by previewing the text.
Scan the title, subtitle, footnotes, pictures, and headings in the text. What do these tell you about the topic being discussed in the reading?
Think about what you know about the topic. You already know a great deal about many topics. What preconceived notions might you bring to the reading?
Look for information about the author. What does the author’s other works tell you about his or her stance?
Think about the rhetorical situation. What is the author’s purpose? Who is the author’s intended audience? - Read the text carefully and write ideas about the text in the margins, on your own paper, or on sticky notes placed in the text.
Circle and look up the definitions to words you do not know or cultural references that you are not familiar with.
Underline the thesis or main idea.
Ask questions about the text. Questions may consider topics such as the author’s purpose or goal in writing, his or her use of evidence to support claims, or his or her use of language. Pause to think of questions you have about the topic at various points in the reading.
Make connections between your own life experiences or knowledge and the text. Does the argument agree with your prior experiences? Have you read other texts with similar arguments? Do you think most people would agree with the evidence presented in the text? Has your own life confirmed or denied any of the arguments in the text?
Find patterns within the text. Does the writer use repetition to get a point across?
Identify assumptions the author makes in presenting the argument. Are the assumptions valid? Do the author’s assumptions challenge your own? In what ways?
Interpret key passages to find the underlying meaning. Are there parts of the texts that can be interpreted in multiple ways? How do you interpret key passages? What does the text really mean? - Reread the text.
Review passages that are difficult. Now that you’ve read the text, can you more easily identify the meaning of difficult passages? What can you look up that might help you dissect the text’s meaning?
Find shifts in points of view or in voice and identify any language that might cue you into the underlying meanings in the text.
Paraphrase difficult passages by restating the passage in your own words.
Create a summary of the text’s main argument in your own words.
Try to describe the text to someone who has not read it.
Writer’s Notebook 4.1 Instructions
For this Writer’s Notebook, you should practice actively reading Katy Waldman’s article called “Facebook’s Unethical Experiment.” Before you read, you should preview the text using the strategies you have learned in your lesson. Then, you should read the article and should use the table on the right of the text to add comments, questions, and annotations about the article. To submit the document, save it to your computer and upload it to the Writer’s Notebook.
Step 1: Preview
After reading the title and glancing over the text (below), what do you think the text will be about? What do you understand about the text from the title? What does the picture add to your first impressions about the text? Enter your response to the preview here:
Step 2: Read
As you read the article, use the right side of the table to annotate the text. Here are some questions to get you started:
What words do you not understand? What connections can you make with the text? What questions do you have about the text? What are some possible ways to interpret the article’s meaning? Which aspects of the text do you agree or disagree with?
Be sure to think about these questions as well as the information about active reading from Unit 4.
Facebook’s Unethical Experiment
It intentionally manipulated users’ emotions without their knowledge.
By
Katy Waldman
Facebook’s methodology in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences raises serious ethical questions.
Photo by Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images
Facebook has been experimenting on us. A
new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
reveals that Facebook intentionally manipulated the news feeds of almost 700,000 users in order to study “emotional contagion through social networks.”
The researchers, who are affiliated with Facebook, Cornell, and the University of California–San Francisco, tested whether reducing the number of positive messages people saw made those people less likely to post positive content themselves. The same went for negative messages: Would scrubbing posts with sad or angry words from someone’s Facebook feed make that person write fewer gloomy updates?
They tweaked the algorithm by which Facebook sweeps posts into members’ news feeds, using a program to analyze whether any given textual snippet contained positive or negative words. Some people were fed primarily neutral to happy information from their friends; others, primarily neutral to sad. Then everyone’s subsequent posts were evaluated for affective meanings.
The upshot? Yes, verily, social networks can propagate positive and negative feelings!
The other upshot: Facebook intentionally made thousands upon thousands of people sad.
Facebook’s methodology raises serious ethical questions. The team may have bent research standards too far, possibly overstepping criteria enshrined in
federal law
and
human rights declarations
. “If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that’s experimentation,” says James Grimmelmann, a professor of technology and the law at the University of Maryland. “This is the kind of thing that would require informed consent.”
Ah, informed consent. Here is the only mention of “informed consent” in the paper: The research “was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research.”
That is not how most social scientists define informed consent.
Here is the relevant section of Facebook’s data use policy: “For example, in addition to helping people see and find things that you do and share, we may use the information we receive about you … for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.”
So there is a vague mention of “research” in the fine print that one agrees to by signing up for Facebook. As bioethicist Arthur Caplan told me, however, it is worth asking whether this lawyerly disclosure is really sufficient to warn people that “their Facebook accounts may be fair game for every social scientist on the planet.”
Any scientific investigation that receives federal funding must follow the
Common Rule for human subjects
, which defines informed consent as involving, among other things, “a description of any foreseeable risks or discomforts to the subject.” As Grimmelmann observes, nothing in the data use policy suggests that Facebook reserves the right to seriously bum you out by cutting all that is positive and beautiful from your news feed. Emotional manipulation is a serious matter, and the barriers to experimental approval are typically high. (Princeton psychologist Susan K. Fiske, who edited the story for PNAS, told the Atlantic that this experiment
was approved by the local institutional review board
. But even she admitted to serious qualms about the study.)
Facebook presumably receives no federal funding for such research, so the investigation might be exempt from the Common Rule. Putting aside the fact that obeying these regulations is common practice even for private research firms such as Gallup and Pew, the question then becomes: Did Cornell or the University of California–San Francisco help finance the study? As public institutions, both fall under the law’s purview. If they didn’t chip in but their researchers participated nonetheless, it is unclear what standards the experiment would legally have to meet, according to Caplan. (I reached out to the study authors, their universities, and Facebook, and will update this story if they reply.)
Even if the study is legal, it appears to flout the ethical standards spelled out in instructions to scientists who wish to publish in PNAS. “Authors must include in the Methods section a brief statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments,” reads
one requirement on the journal’s website
. (The study did not.) “All experiments must have been conducted according to the principles expressed in the
Declaration of Helsinki
,” reads another. The Helsinki standard mandates that human subjects “be adequately informed of the aims, methods, sources of funding, any possible conflicts of interest, institutional affiliations of the researcher, the anticipated benefits and
potential risks of the study and the discomfort it may entail
.”
Over the course of the study, it appears, the social network made some of us happier or sadder than we would otherwise have been. Now it’s made all of us more mistrustful.
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