Too much, too fast, too fragmented. Is there more to it?
Ever since the internet began to deluge our brains with an unceasing flow of information—meaning both raw data, and raw data given structure in the act of “informing”—intellectuals have been sounding alarms over the impacts on our thinking processes. There is a consensus, even among boosters of new data-heavy technology, that we need to take a hard look at those impacts and what they portend for the future of our society.
Nicholas Carr devoted a book to the subject in 2010, entitled The Shallows. His book begins with Carr’s self-observations on how his internet information-gathering practices have infused his thinking with a shorter attention span, lack of follow-through on reading material, and a propensity to jump to shaky inferences based on short, superficial snippets of information. He makes the case that these phenomena have spread throughout internet userdom (now, most of our society), to the detriment of deep comprehension and wisdom. (I’m not sure Carr used the word “wisdom”—it might sound a little sententious, and I read the book years ago—but if he didn’t use it I doubt he’d object to my imputing the idea to him.)
Carr—and many others preaching similar messages —puts an emphasis on distraction as the main threat to deeper thinking. How can you concentrate on any one train of thought when there are so many intercommunicating trains crowding the station, tempting you to hop on board via hyperlink? And take you to yet another crowded station with yet more bright and shiny hyperlinks?
How right is he? Is Carr’s examination of The Shallows too shallow?
Now we have Maryanne Wolf, in The Guardian, sounding this theme in an opinion piece entitled “Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound.” (You will see, if you read her article [link near end of this post], her rather drab style leans toward the academic and abstract side of things. That headline doesn’t say the half of it. But, she’s really smart!)
Wolf is an expert in child development with a professorship at Tufts, and she is the Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts. Her life’s (self-described) work is to help children learn to read. Based on her and other research and interactions with hundreds of children, she says that current work in neuroscience indicates that “the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago.” And something troublesome is now happening with that reading circuit.
Exactly what Wolf means by the reading circuit that arose 6,000 years ago is not spelled out in The Guardian piece, so here’s my interpretation. What she is NOT saying is that the reading circuit was part of a genetic blueprint, laid down in our DNA—there wasn’t enough time for natural evolution to perform that trick. Rather, the circuit was an adaptation learned through exposure and training, that strengthened certain connections and generated a new pathway within the structures of neurons determined by heredity. A circuit shaped by nurture rather than nature.
The reading circuit that we have kept passing on through the millennia from one generation to the next has done a pretty good job in increasing knowledge, and improving the human lot. Many of us are wedded to it, but few with the fierce loyalty of child educator Maryanne Wolf. For her, reading ability is foundational to civilization, and it is vital that we get reading right.
Wolf warns that our now-dominant media give advantage to “processes that are fast, multi-task oriented and well-suited for large volumes of information, like the current digital medium.”
As the reading circuit becomes trained on these newly arisen processes, the older, slower, more focused circuit gets hijacked. The cost, according to her and UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield, is the loss of “slower, time-demanding deep reading processes, like inference, critical analysis and empathy, all of which are indispensable to learning at any age.”*
Behold the culprit in plain sight—Screens!
Most of us are already concerned about The Age of Distraction ushered in by the internet. Most of us 35 years of age or older feel kinship with Nicholas Carr as we wrestle with distraction. It’s more than sheer volume—the Police song “Too Much Information” is now 37 years old, and we got through that era without brain blowup . Now, it’s as much the zigs and zags and the numberless temptations scrambling for our attention from every direction, that are shredding our ability to concentrate.
More basic than distraction: screen time alters the “reading circuit” itself.
Maryanne Wolf contends there’s a suite of problems around reading comprehension—yes,it’s about sheer data volume and distraction, but also goes to most fundamental interface between the reader and the digital world: the screen. Screen reading, goes the argument, heavily emphasizes two-dimensional sight, to the detriment of deep understanding that comes from more complex experience.
Wolf describes a revealing experiment in reading comprehension conducted by psychologists in Norway (with literacy rates near 100 percent, Norway is among the top six most literate nations). High school students were assigned to read a short story: half the students read it in Kindle, half in paperback. Questioned afterwards, the students who read in the paperback excelled the students who read on Kindle in comprehension, “particularly in their ability to sequence detail and reconstruct the plot in chronological order.”
But why? Here’s where you need to read Wolf’s article (yes, the link is coming below; be patient!) for several angles on this important topic. I would just like to speak to the angle I found most fascinating, and which immediately connected with my personal experience: the sense of touch. That and the kinetic sense are my topics in the next section.
Physicality of information-gathering: touch matters
Wolf refers to other researchers emphasizing the role of touch involved in print reading that “adds an important redundancy to information.” (You will find a discussion of this just below the lovely photo of a child lying in a sun-dappled meadow, reading a book.)
It’s said that the sense of smell is the most primitive of the senses, but if touch isn’t the most primitive, it’s a tie.** And that’s why touch has an underrated but significant role in the act of reading, which we ordinarily think of as exclusively visual.
A book, even a paperback, has a range of textures that cold, smooth smartphones, e-readers, and laptops cannot supply. There’s the difference between the cover and the pages within a single book—and between books there’s a wide range of cover textures and paper stocks. You can thumb and riffle through pages, and stick your finger in the pages of one of your favorite passages—and hold it there while you riffle through many more pages simultaneously. Try that with a Kindle!
Basically, screens are flat, and books have three dimensions as well as texture. That explains what I do when an email from one of the magazines I subscribe to announces the electronic version is already available! Days ahead of the print version! At those times I “virtually” set aside the electronic version and wait for the printed magazine, which is a hell of a lot more pleasurable to read. A tranquil pleasure that kids locked to their screens are deprived of.
[An aside: I believe that one of the advantages of physical print over screen print is the sharpness and high definition of the type. Easier on the eye. You find that in magazine print although not in newsprint. Maryanne Wolf doesn’t discuss that, although Marshal McLuhan did, back in the digital Dark Ages, then contrasting print with TV. He thought print was “hot” vs TV “cool.” Don’t ask me what that meant.]
The tactility of books, magazines, and newsprint adds to what Wolf refers to a “redundancy of information” that psychologists believe vitally enhances the reading experience.
The kinetic sense, closely associated with touch, participates as well. Books have heft that varies between books—the heft and feel of a compact paperback, versus a tall skinny children’s hardbound book, give each a distinct character. And make them memorable. The first may serve to read on a subway; the second holding a child in your lap and reading to her, while she grabs the cover or runs her hand up and down the page, pausing on her favorite character—touch, in combination with vision, gives book reading a sensory intimacy, and a uniqueness of experience that screens cannot match. There’s a sensory richness (we can throw smell into the mix, since every book has a distinct smell), that adds an emotional component beyond the content. This helps explain findings that children who are read to early in life develop reading and language skills faster in every medium.
The Medium is the Message: what’s in the digital cards for today’s kids?
Marshal McLuhan made his provocative catchphrase, “The Medium is the Message” key to his own message, which was not to say that content was unimportant, but to draw attention to a much-ignored phenomenon: media shape culture, whatever the content. In the last century, where McLuhan hung out, the cultural shifts driven first by radio and then by television were observable—although whether they had the radical social impacts McLuhan claimed is up for debate. Did TV help end the Vietnam War by its very nature involving watchers in the war, regardless of just where the camera was pointing, and what the narrative was?
The lightning-fast digital communications revolution, and the dominance of screens as the medium through which the world comes to the user, portend a stronger, and faster, shift than what McLuhan was talking about. Sometimes it appears to me at age 72 that this shift really IS radical. But where this shift is taking us is unknown. It’s strange, but is it really bad?
We’re in the midst of it, and it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. We have guesses—Nicholas Carr maintains it is making our comprehension of the world around us shallower, and that’s bad. He has plenty of worried company.
Maryanne Wolf believes her and other research in child learning point to much the same thing. The “reading circuit” that persisted largely unchanged even through the age of radio and television, is being reshaped, especially in the fast-developing brains of children. It has been hijacked by the digital milieu.
The shape it’s now taking has ramifications throughout society, and some may be dangerous in unthought-of ways. The new shape guides us toward superficiality, decision-making on incomplete information, truncated lines of thinking, failure to see both sides of an issue, forecasting events while bereft of a deep knowledge of history. For now, Wolf hypothesizes that some of the sharp divisions we are experiencing in our public spaces stem from the digital hijacking of the reading circuit, even in adults.
Indeed, when I pick up a newspaper now, I have to deliberately force myself to read the continuations of front-page news on the inner pages. The temptation is to believe reading two paragraphs is enough to understand an issue. That’s especially if the first two paragraphs feed into my preconceptions—oh, I know all about tactical nuclear weapons (about which I have a locked box of preconceptions), so why bother to unfold the paper to go to page 7? And then fold it back again? What a nuisance!
Is the shift inevitably headed toward dragon-infested shores?
Wolf’s answer is no. She’s not for throwing the screen-intensive baby out along with the polluted digital bathwater. But the solution is complicated, and subtle. In the last paragraph of “Skim Reading is the New Normal,” she advocates for cultivating a “new kind of brain: a ‘bi-literate’ reading brain capable of the deepest forms of thought in either digital or traditional mediums.”
Talk about a tall order! “Bi-literate!?” Wow! Frankly, it’s hard to imagine for myself. But the plasticity of young brains positions youngsters for revealing ventures into that complicated territory. A new kind of brain? My observations of young folks (God, they are smart!) suggest it’s possible. If enough people care.
Now it’s time for some hyperlinks!
First for Wolf’s “Skimming is the New Normal” piece in The Guardian. (I remind you once again that The Guardian is the only thoroughly professional, authoritative, and well-written news source that comes free. It’s free by default, BUT you should contribute something, anything, by going to their website. Big bang for the buck.)
Maryanne Wolf on the reading circuit
Interview with Wolf that explains her background and why she does what she does: Maryanne Wolf interview
14-minute video of Wolf concerning early child development and child’s brain malleability, posed as an “advice to parents” segment. She is very emphatic in speaking, with plenty of affect, talking with her hands. The passion is clear. Quite an enjoyable contrast with her dry writing style in The Guardian. Maybe their editor missed something. . Wolf video interview
New scientific evidence on the benefit of reading to children:
Reading to kids changes their brains
Review of Carr’s The Shallows by Jonah Lehrer. Lehrer takes issue with Carr’s negativity about the internet (still capitalized “Internet” back in 2010). Very insightful critique, although Lehrer oversimplifies some of Carr’s ideas in order to take jabs at them. Lehrer would also take issue with Maryanne Wolf if he had a shot. Difference between Carr and Wolf of course, is that she is actually a scientific researcher.
Lehrer reviews The Shallows
=========== footnotes ==============
* One of the commentators in The Guardian argues that deep reading processes are not necessarily instrumental in empathy—empathy preceded reading. It’s a minor if well-taken point.
** This I have to say about touch, and it’s part of my argument for the essentialness (not a word, but I don’t know a better) of touch. The last dog I owned, and the last cat I owned, may have been my all-time favorite pets (certainly the cat was). When I think of their passing, what comes to me is the feel of their bodies just after they died—the dog at a vets, the cat at home. I can feel it as vividly as I can see scenes from any moment of my life. You may remember a similar experience—possibly more profound, perhaps involving a person. That tactile sensation goes soul-deep. In my belief, it goes down through the limbic system into the reptile brain.
I can say reptile brain because just this morning I heard on The Ninety-Second Naturalist (best program per unit of time (1.5 minutes) on NPR), how American alligators guard their eggs from predators, and, after the babies hatch, gently lift them in their jaws and take them to the water, where the mother will continue to guard them. For a description of this care, check out:
Alligator care for young
What struck me here was the gentle lifting of the young in the mother’s toothy alligator jaws. Imagine it! There’s the power of touch in one of the most primitive scenarios I can imagine.