A couple days ago I was walking around a mall looking for a restroom, and the closest one available was the one at Barnes & Noble. I am a book addict, and although in the past Barnes & Noble had been a constant location, with ebooks coming along I had not been into the store for at least six months.
As I walked into the place, aside for some flies here and there, the place was really empty, nothing resembling what it once was. This is probably a sign that the future for brick and mortar bookstore chains is not all that bright, but this is no news. What stroke me however, was how the experience of walking close to the shelves made me discover a number of interesting books, seeing connections that I would not be able to see on the web. Of course I didn't buy anything since the price of an ebook is not only lower but also the book itself is much easier to carry, but nonetheless the question remained: Why is the experience different and, I would risk saying, richer?
At the risk of running into folk psychology, I think that one of the potential answers is that bookstores bring along the concept of spatial immersion, and with our currently technology this experience can hardly be reproduced on the Web. I am no specialist in spatial or embedded immersion, but in my personal experience I can detect at least the following aspects:
- Books are organized in a certain order, and this order forges associations among different topics
- Being immersed in a bookstore your visual space can literally go in every single direction, and this limitless vision abolishes the constraints we are so used to when it comes to small screens.
- There are other emotional stimuli involved, such as smelling the paper all over the place, the smell of paper probably evoking memories of fun hours reading interesting novels or interacting with interesting information
There is certainly far more, these are just notes from a first impression, the main point that I am trying to get across here is that it is no wonder that online education has such huge attrition rates, as it is not stimulating as many senses as a regular environment does.
