As technology advances, deep reading suffers

[Liberal_in_LA]

Today, a counterrevolution is under way. As the computer and cell phone become our main reading devices, the book is being pushed to the periphery of culture. According to recent studies by Ball State University and the federal government, the average American spends more than eight hours a day peering into a screen - TV, computer or cell phone (sometimes all three at once) - but devotes just 20 minutes to reading books and other printed works.

Reading from a screen is very different from reading from a book. A book provides a shield against distraction, allowing us to focus our entire attention on an author's narrative or argument. When text is put onto a screen, it enters what the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow terms an "ecosystem of interruption technologies." The words have to compete for our attention with links, e-mails, texts, tweets, Facebook updates, videos, ads and all the other visual stimuli that pour through our computers.

In a very real sense, screen reading is returning us to that distant time when there were no spaces between words. Reading is again becoming a cognitively strenuous job as the mind struggles to keep track not only of the words but also of all the surrounding distractions. The best our overloaded brains can do is skim and scan.

Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and an expert on the neuroscience of reading, notes that learning to read deeply is a painstaking process, requiring changes deep in our brains. She worries that the shift from immersive page-based reading to distracted screen-based reading could impede the development of the specialized neural circuits that make richly interpretive reading possible. We might turn back into mere "decoders" of text.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/20/INL91DU44K.DTL

[Fumesucker]

1. Yeah, I've noticed this..

I used to be able to read a book cover to cover, only stopping for things like work, food, sex, sleep..

Now I rarely do that any more.

[Liberal_in_LA]

3. My reading of fiction has really slacked off. &%$# internet!

I use to read a novel a week or more

[girl gone mad]

10. You can try this:

http://infinitesummer.org

I think it's a good book for getting back into deep reading and having the web site should help with motivation. It's from last summer, but there's no reason you can't follow along the same track this summer. It starts June 21st (tomorrow).

I didn't participate because I had just re-read Infinite Jest after DFW's suicide, but some friends who took part were really happy they did it and have since gotten back into reading novels on a regular basis.

[Davis_X_Machina]

2. Sven Birkerts...

...raised this possibility over a decade ago in his The Gutenberg Elegies. Still worth reading.

[BrklynLiberal]

4. Heard this on NPR the other morning....

The one thing I always loved about reading a good book was the sensation of actually BEING THERE. In the story...

If you have ever seen the movie "The Never Ending Story"...it is like that...you move into the times and places that you read about...and lose consciousness of where you really are.

It is a wonderful sensation, and I am sorry for those who will never enjoy it.

[marmar]

11. Exactly. There's no substitute for an actual book.

nt

[zazen]

5. this is true in a lot of acad publishing as well--surplus of hastily written journal articles

The ability to find time to write a painstakingly researched and deeply reflective monograph is greatly constrained. Of course, a lot of that capacity was provided through the surplus labor of spouses and fewer pressures on tenure-stream faculty to publish in peer-reviewed journals and obtain extramural funding to be more competitive for a decreasing number of positions. And, full-time parents trying to write such carefully crafted pieces 30 years ago had a helluva lot of distractions too.

But even if one weren't writing on screen with wireless internet, there are still hundreds of e-mails sitting in one's reader demanding 24-hour feedback (with the tacit expectation from administrators) in a way that was incomprehensible just a generation ago.

I'm glad to see a series of studies coming out about limitations of ceaseless internet usage, esp. among adolescents. I've been raising concerns in every educational forum for years in which I find myself, based mostly on anecdotal evidence, but I'm pretty much written off as a Luddite for daring to question that it's not uniformly positive. Some of it's amazing, but some of I think can be really damaging in ways we're only beginning to understand.

The standard argument in the academic world (and I get this from humanities faculty who derided the internet as a fad 20 years ago) is that those who seek balance are like Plato criticizing writing, while writing, or medievalist scribes critiquing Gutenberg. Because each of those new technologies (alphabetic literacy and printing) succeeded, digital literacies ergo will also. They tend to forget the enormous amount of fossil fuels required to bring this particular technology into being. But you really get blank looks if you bring that up.

[Juche]

6. What are the benefits though

Sounds like good and bad. The bad is attention span goes down. But if people can actually find a way to make media more information dense, then jumping from thing to thing could be a good trait to have.

[Posteritatis]

7. Imminent death of literacy predicted (this is a recording)! Yawn. (nt)

[nichomachus]

8. Well, the causality may go the other way

A lot of Americans don't read because they are functionally illiterate. They can pronounce the words on a page, but they have no reading comprehension and not attention span. So, they may turn to technological devices because they are more stimulating and require less concentration.

I've known college seniors -- and I'm going back 20 years now -- who couldn't read a complicated text -- only something that was really at about a ninth grade level. It has to do with the willful destruction of our educational system.

[LaurenG]

9. I was just trying to explain this to someone I know

because I have noticed this in myself.

[Heywood J]

12. I still read books, but fewer of them.

I've found that it's harder and harder to find a book that's both new and good. The last three new books I've read were absolute crap - I threw two in the recycle bin and donated the other (the lesser evil of the three). Others that I've skimmed on the shelves were mass-market tripe, authors who didn't know the subject matter and made it up from a synopsis, or were full of writer traps like Mary Sue.

The library is useful to get around this, but has a limited selection. Writing a book has become like writing for television: it doesn't matter how good the content is, as long as it sells copies somehow.