It seems that lengthy articles have gone out of favour with the general public; attention-getting phrases are instead catching people's eye. Even contributions for printed media are culled (集成化)by web-editors to achieve the results of 1 +1≥2, strengthening both writing style and reading habits in mass communication.
In reporting the event of a postgraduate who hanged himself using towels in a campus dormitory, for example, a few key words are selected on the university website, such as "bring Mom to university while studying" , "unemployed following graduation" , "undesirable learning" ,"fate has nothing to do with knowledge" ... and readers are quite satisfied with the media report.
Fragmentary reading, while providing great convenience for getting informative material, has also caused concern among experts and scholars, who believe that our cultural pace of development as well as the depth and wholeness of our print culture have all been harmed.
In my view, however, fragmentary reading is in fact a natural selection of the variety of our society which is undergoing a period of change. Looking back at the history of man's reading, for several thousand years people read from bamboo slips, and sheepskins, which did not interrupt knowledge spread or the recording of inventions. Everything was and still is about the reader, not the medium.
In fact, traditional print materials may also be read fragmentarily while materials on mass medium can be read consistently as well, centering on their contents. Reading habits form and vary following thinking patterns and serve these patterns.
Reading and thinking, whether they are fragmented or thoughtful, can actually be put together harmoniously as a whole in our mind, in the same way that both intensive and extensive reading are combined in language learning lessons. Instead of being opposite, combinations of this kind, I think, have to be learned during the social change.
