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?
