(Mar, 2012) The distinction between a ‘lean forward’ and ‘lean back’ medium apparently began with interactive television. The terms have commonly been used by hand-wavers such as marketing people, media theorists, and futurists. The distinction has very little real scientific basis. There isn’t any clear idea what these terms really mean.
Still, there’s something going on here. Jakob Nielsen, in studies of reading via print versus the web, found major differences between the two. To the question of “How readers read on the web,” Nielsen answers: “They don’t.”
According to Nielsen, “People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.”
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