Reading...
Karin Littau and Andrew Piper have noted another dimension:
physicality. Piper, Littau and Anne Mangen's group emphasize that the
sense of touch in print reading adds an important redundancy to
information – a kind of "geometry" to words, and a spatial "thereness"
for text. As Piper notes, human beings need a knowledge of where they
are in time and space that allows them to return to things and learn
from re-examination – what he calls the "technology of recurrence".
The importance of recurrence for both young and older readers involves
the ability to go back, to check and evaluate one's understanding of a
text. The question, then, is what happens to comprehension when our
youth skim on a screen whose lack of spatial thereness discourages
"looking back."
The possibility that critical analysis, empathy and other deep reading
processes could become the unintended "collateral damage" of our
digital culture is not a simple binary issue about print vs digital
reading. It is about how we all have begun to read on any medium and
how that changes not only what we read, but also the purposes for why
we read. Nor is it only about the young. The subtle atrophy of
critical analysis and empathy affects us all. It affects our ability
to navigate a constant bombardment of information. It incentivizes a
retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information, which
require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false
information and demagoguery.
There's an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with age: use
it or lose it. It is a very hopeful principle when applied to critical
thought in the reading brain because it implies choice. The story of
the changing reading brain is hardly finished. We possess both the
science and the technology to identify and redress the changes in how
we read before they become entrenched. If we work to understand
exactly what we will lose, alongside the extraordinary new capacities
that the digital world has brought us, there is as much reason for
excitement as caution.
We need to cultivate a new kind of brain: a "bi-literate" reading
brain capable of the deepest forms of thought in either digital or
traditional mediums. A great deal hangs on it: the ability of citizens
in a vibrant democracy to try on other perspectives and discern truth;
the capacity of our children and grandchildren to appreciate and
create beauty; and the ability in ourselves to go beyond our present
glut of information to reach the knowledge and wisdom necessary to
sustain a good society.
(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf?utm_source=densediscovery&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter)