Two recent pieces which came across my desk reaffirm the critical importance of reading in the development and retention of strong thinking skills. The first was an article from The Atlantic provocatively entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and the second was a summary of a National Endowment for the Arts report entitled “To Read or Not to Read,” which has been billed as the most comprehensive study of current American reading habits. This week I will highlight The Atlantic piece, and in the near future I will focus on the NEA study.
The Atlantic article by Nicholas Carr noted how the link-driven reading that one often does on the internet appears to erode the “capacity for concentration and contemplation.” While Carr is quick to point out the benefits of the kind of research and fact-finding that web surfing makes possible, he remarks that, “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
Carr notes that developmental psychologists, educational researchers, scholars, and media observers are beginning to offer opinions and conduct studies on the impact of doing more and more of one’s reading on the internet. For instance, a recent publication by a group of British academics “suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.” They found that those who do a lot of internet reading “exhibit a form of skimming activity, hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article before they ‘bounce’ out to another site.” They conclude that many “are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages, and abstracts… to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”
Certainly, such reading can have its place. However, Carr quotes developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf as saying, “We are not only what we read. We are how we read.” She believes that web-inspired reading “may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.” She believes we – and our children whose reading habits are just forming – run the risk of becoming “mere decoders of information” and compromising our ability to “interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction.” She reminds us that reading plays an important role “in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains” and that “such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli” are likely to be impacted if one’s predominant reading venue shifts to the internet.
Carr worries, too, about the impact of “hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws as they surround content” with the flash of the internet. He posits that “the result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.” Sustained reading – and sustained thinking – get sacrificed. He puts it this way:
“The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire… but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book… we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading… is indistinguishable from deep thinking.”
Clearly, it is important that our students be prepared to use new and emerging technologies. But as children are developing reading and thinking skills, newer forms of media can’t be allowed to supplant the primacy of traditional reading and real books. The ability to engage with content, sustain attention, follow story lines, make sense of increasingly complex arguments, think critically, and develop deep and rich vocabularies and interests are bedrock skills that are just too important to risk sacrificing. This is particularly the case since future experience and research will point to impacts we don’t yet suspect.