The Owl has Flown

In Sven Birkert's article the Owl has Flown he express his belifes about reading today.Birkert claims that there are two types of readers. The first is a "vertical" reader who reads the same text thousands of times and gets every ounce of information out of it. The second is a "horizontial" reader, this is someone who scans alot of text but does not get all of the infromation. Birkert feels that centuries ago most of the readers would be considered "vertical" because there was very littel text that was read more fequentaly. He is convinced that todays age of reading text has gone horizontial because text is present on labels, internet and wrappers but the readers are not getting any value out of what they read.
Although Birkerts does not say so directly, he apparently assumes that all of the "scaning" that the current generationis doing just goes in one ear and out the other with no comprehension. This is simply not true. I belive that even though there is some text that we read with littel content there is also text that we read full of it. I like to view the generation as "diagonal "reading.