Despite its extraordinary contributions, the digital world may be the greatest threat yet to the endangered reading brain as it has developed over the past five thousand years.
More then a few people have indicated that I was over thinking the issues I presented in my recent blog post death of the newspaper: murder or suicide? Naturally, this led me to think about the issues some more, with a particular focus on reading in general, and this latest bout of over thinking made me notice an excellent letter to the editor in the January 28th New Yorker (which the above quote comes from), which was a response to Caleb Crain’s December 24th article Twilight of the Books.
Now if you happen to be interested in an extremely interesting, well-researched, and well-written article about people losing not just the will to read but even the ability, which also includes a comprehensive review of the history behind reading dating back to the fourth millenium B.C. and its effect on the functioning of the brain, I strongly recommend the New Yorker article. One particularly interesting angle covers how reading isn’t really natural, and that some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class”, much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy in the 19th century. Given some of the stats presented (like only 46% of Americans having read a work of creative literature in the last 12 months, while reading skills for the average 12th grader continue to decline), it would seem we’re well on the way.
But in terms of the wikinomics themes, I found the response to this article (from Maryanne Wolf of Tuft University) particularly interesting as it references digitally driven media directly. The quote I started this post with is the end of the letter, and was directly proceeded by the following:
This type of activation is the basis for “deep reading” and the highest forms of thought in a society, from novel thinking to the deliberation of virtue. My primary concern for the future of reading is that these critical areas will be short-circuited in the next generation of readers, whose formative years may be immersed too early in digitally driven media. The addictive immediacy and the overwhelming volume of information available in the “Googled world” of novice readers invite neither time for concentrated analysis and inference nor the motivation for them to think beyond all the information given.
So what everyone can seem to agree on is that this new generation is wired differently - but there’s a lot of (over)thinking going into whether this is a good or bad thing. Thoughts?
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The atrophy of reading skills in the face of a digital world, full of convenient access and driven by speed of access, and demands for 24/7 “cognitive excitement” might well be real. In particular, I have been increasingly concerned by the “sound bite” nature of “content” on the web and the desire of many to consume information in diminutive chunks. While it is efficient and immediately gratifying, it may be more like smorgasbord rather than multi-course dinner savored over an entire evening. As the more recent generations become dependent on digital devices for content, so too, they may be less interested in other forms of information access. We may well have a whole generation whose level of attention is significantly reduced. If this proves to be the case, we might well be concerned that it could lead to a reduction of deep reflective thought, prone more to reaction rather than consideration, and hence an growing inability to explore the full dimensions of broad themes that demand slow contemplative thought as compared to quick reactive thought.
As Marshall McLuhan’s famous observation, “The Medium is the Message” suggests, the medium does transform the message and leaves its mark. We know that television and other “served-up” media affects brain waves and emphasizes the entertainment and shock value of information or disinformation over real content and critical inquiry. So the new digital age may inexorably extinguish the reading of long works.
On the other hand, one might venture that the visual nature of the digital world and the greater scope of available information, albeit at a perhaps more superficial level, may contribute to better spatial thinking skills. So too the depth of information available in a “Googled world” might well support deeper inquiry for those minds that are compelled to examine the complexity of a given subject area. An let us not forget that this net generation is exposed to a great variety of media.
Nonetheless, we should be vigilant in this area and we should encourage parents and guardians to encourage the reading of classic works and put limits on the use of digital technologies in children and teens. Perhaps the real enemy of reading is not the digital world per se, so much as the unaturalness of humans to put aside the time for private reflection, or simple idle time whether on a bus, walking down a street or traveling in a car — in a rising sea of digital distractions.
Comment by Nick Vitalari - February 6, 2008 11:31 pm
Looking at my reading habits the Internet has definitely affected my “deep reading” and the amount I read books in general.
I wouldn’t say deep reading is endanger of being killed off, just the Internet is evolving the way we receive information.
The amount and diversity of information I read has grown immensely since 1995.
The Internet has introduced me to a lot of books as well.
However I do deal with attention attention deficits when trying to read books. I have a lot of half read books laying around.
Comment by Kin Lane - February 7, 2008 12:49 am
What is the property of a written text? That it is printed on paper? Or shown as an HTML page in a browser window? The information it transports is the same.
As far as I remember we had this discussion a few years before. Instead of the Internet the TV was the culprit. But one of the differences between TV and Internet is, that the almost biggest part of the internet is still textbased. Lots of people using the internet are reading more than a few years before and even started to write on their own blog or articles for wikipedia.
I think there is a separation within the society: one part use the new media for communication, education and inspiration. They will win. The other part will stuck on the fun part of the (old and) new media. They are lost since the start of broadcasting cheap and stupid TV shows.
Comment by Thomas Schmidt - February 7, 2008 3:25 am
Great comments so far - thanks guys!
A combination of Nick’s and Thomas’ comments - in particular the sound bite nature of the Internet, the notion that people are reading more now because of the Internet (which makes sense), coupled with the fact that reading scores continue to decline, has got me thinking more about digital media and user-generated content.
If the majority of us our bad writers, and (say) we spend most of our time online reading each others blogs and comments, might it start a downward spiral where our critical reading abilities get worse and worse as we read more and more poorly written things?
Kin - I was thinking a similar thing about my own reading habits. When I wonder where my time for “deep reading” has gone, I think about how much time I spend scanning and reading short clips and it all makes sense.
Final note, and this ties back to Nick’s closing comment - when I want to really study and think about something I take a hard copy of it from my home office (where my computer sits) to the living room (where my TV sits). I can resist any temptation to flick on the TV for hours and days on end, but I often can’t resist the call of the world wide web for very long at all.
Comment by Denis - February 7, 2008 11:05 am
This quote is interesting:
“Given some of the stats presented (like only 46% of Americans having read a work of creative literature in the last 12 months, while reading skills for the average 12th grader continue to decline), it would seem we’re well on the way.”
Maybe people are reading books and documents that give them valuable skills. Fiction books have little of value to offer compared to the possibility of gaining skills which increase one’s income.
Comment by TJ - February 8, 2008 5:12 pm
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This is a very interesting article and there were some great points raised in the comments. As an n-gener, it’s hard to remember the last time I read a piece of creative literature. I think the last novel I read was the final Harry Potter. This raises an important point in my mind. Is reading less creative literature necessarily a bad thing? The majority of fiction read today has little creative or intellectual merit. The best and brightest of today’s society are not joining the reading elite; instead they are becoming engineers, doctors, investment bankers or lawyers. Often, these people simply don’t have the time for deep reading.
As a medium, reading takes a significantly longer time than something like a movie. The intellectual merit of mediums like television and motion pictures has increased dramatically in my opinion in recent years. Can this deep thinking occur on a discussion forum for the show Lost? I found that the movie No Country for Old Men packed more intellectual punch than an average novel I would read. More importantly, they can be absorbed in a fraction of the time it would take to read a lengthy novel. Has society grown past the usefulness of a Tolstoy or Conrad? The few people able to fully grasp their value are too busy solving society’s problems.
Personally, the digital world has drastically increased the amount of non-fiction reading that I do. The digital world exposes me to books and articles I would otherwise be unaware of. In addition, it is easier to gain access to these books and articles as I can download them for free. I have actually become so used to reading on my computer screen that I find it more difficult to read something on paper. I find it frustrating to not have a search function while reading, nor links to supporting articles. Maybe I’m just a perfect example of the problem with today’s readers.
Comment by Ben L - April 1, 2008 12:45 am
[...] books, and we’re actually losing the critical thinking skills associated with reading (see: does the digital world endanger the reading brain, where I talked about the great article on the Twilight of the Books). There are many other people [...]
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[...] outsourced. Carr argues that we aren’t as capable of reading dense texts as they used to be (covered previously by Denis), because we have gotten used to Google and the Internet aggressively distilling ideas down to [...]
Pingback by Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Dumbness: Maybe Not So Generational After All - June 11, 2008 2:08 pm
[...] brains, and more specifically our collective reading skills. We’ve recently written about it here, here, here, and here, Nicholas Carr had a great piece published in the Atlantic Monthly called [...]
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