Reading is an act of contemplation . . . an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction . . . it returns us to a reckoning with time. —David Ulin
Rarely do I posit a book as a “must read” to others, but I may make an exception for this one.
Maryanne Wolf has written a book that scientifically and personally addresses a deep concern that most of us have today.
What are the consequences to our ourselves, to our children, and to our future as a modern society with the given shift from reading published books to scanning digital information?
In her book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World the author explores what the digital revolution is doing to our ability to think, reflect, ponder, and grow into empathic beings. Without deep reading, the author suggest the fount of our common wisdom and understanding will dry up.
She questions with lucid prose and the results of reputable scientific studies where our literary culture is headed, and if we have lost the art of deep reading, are we also losing the art of deep thinking, and in the end, our human history of deep writing?
From her book: “There is neither the time nor the impetus for the nurturing of a quiet eye, much less the memory of its harvests. Behind our screens, at work and at home, we have sutured the temporal segments of our days so as to switch our attention from one task or one source of stimulation to another. We cannot but be changed. And we are—”
As an example, the author conducts her own experiment; purposely engaging with a favorite book of her youth that set the course of her love of literature. She discovered that the same book that gave her so much joy was laborious, and she could not understand how she had loved it so. Then, she decided to practice her own advice, and read it again, slower, with no agenda or timetable– soaking the words in one by one, not scanning the page to get through. By the time she finished the second reading with this deliberately careful reading, with a “quiet eye”, she rediscoved her original joy in the book. What she learned is that in her immersion in the digital world, she had forgotten how to read.
The author strikes as balanced approach as she can given the scientific and cultural data. She does not advocate unplugging. She does cry out that we need to pay attention to what we are doing with digital, and what we are giving up in the process. There can be an integration between digital and paper communication. But that is not the direction we are headed. Paper is losing the fight, and so is our ability to gain empathy, understanding, and wisdom that only comes from deep immersion in quality books.
And what is happening to the brains of our young children who have bright and shiny things calling out to them all day long in the form of digital tools, teaching them not how to stay with something, but to look always for something even shinier?
“In childhood, he declared, the word-rich get richer and the word-poor get poorer, a phenomenon he called the “Matthew Effect”41 after a passage in the New Testament. There is also a Matthew-Emerson Effect for background knowledge: those who have read widely and well will have many resources to apply to what they read; those who do not will have less to bring, which, in turn, gives them less basis for inference, deduction, and analogical thought and makes them ripe for falling prey to unadjudicated information, whether fake news or complete fabrications. Our young will not know what they do not know. Others, too. Without sufficient background” ―
These questions and more are deftly addressed from both a scientific and cultural basis.
I had suspected this trend, but now, after reading her book, I cannot look away from it.
Kind Regards,
Bob
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