While it may be true to say that motion pictures and TV have had a negative effect on people's reading habits, the Web has probably had the opposite effect. The Web consists largely of texts, an increasing number of which are enhanced by photographs, sound and video. While I regularly use the Web to locate a text, I never read more than a couple of paragraphs from the screen. I always download and print the text so that I can sit in a comfortable armchair and read it in the normal way. In other words, I am continuing to read from the printed page - as I have done for more than 50 years.
Most people find it difficult to read large chunks of text from a TV or computer screen.
In this respect, new technology is less effective than that invented by Caxton. This article is beginning to sound very negative about the Web. As I indicated at the beginning of this article, the Web is a remarkable invention. The consequences of this belief are that the advantages of offline technology are often unknown to the new generation of language teachers, who are unaware that more elaborate and faster interactivity than that currently offered on the Web was available on microcomputers as long as 15 years ago. I do not wish to play down the imaginative use of the Web that is being made by many language teachers.