A very well put together article in the CSM today by Matthew Shaer. Covers a lot of ground our readers will be familiar with, but one thing stood out for me.
“It’s not enough to say, ‘Oh, people will read more on an e-reader.’ ” says Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University, in Medford, Mass. “My questions are about how we read.” Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., says that reading is evolutionary and that advances in technology have decreased attention spans.
In her book, “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,” Dr. Wolf argues that the act of reading is evolutionary. Literacy has come to humans slowly, she writes, filtered in trickles or floods from one generation to the next. One of the heroes of her book is Marcel Proust, the 19th-century French novelist. Proust saw reading as an inherently solitary, immersive act; he believed the best books allowed readers a chance to exercise their own imagination.
These days, the opportunity for that kind of “deep dive reading” is vanishing, Wolf says. … “My concern is that we will develop within the next generation a shorter, less-enriched [brain] circuitry for reading,” says Wolf. “And I don’t think I’m ultraconservative. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t read online…. I’m saying that we need to preserve what’s best about the present reading brain – preserve the beautiful function of books in our lives – as we move across mediums that will allow us ever greater access to information.”
Again and again, in introducing the Kindle, Jeff Bezos claimed his aspiration was total immersive reading, where the device ‘disappears’ from your mind.
So to the extent he achieved this, Bezos has bettered the book.
Also of note here is the implication that a ‘book’ is the most immersive tool of reading (it’s what Proust used!) — and yet so many of today’s old-fogey readers sniff that the book as an object is what they would miss if compelled to ‘read off a screen’ — and we had that study mentioned here about all the smelly compounds of pulp, ink, mold, and binding glues, that made up so much of the mystique of the book. All of which is a distraction from the text.
There are some better balanced viewpoints elsewhere in the article. I think it is a mistake to conflate computer-screen Twitter and blog reading with reading Hemingway on a Kindle. They are just not the same thing. It’s like saying that swimming and skiing are the same thing because they both take place outside.
We are still battling a lot of old habits dying hard out there. My boomer-aged stepmother, who works in new media, still thinks that when I say ‘ebook reader’ I mean ‘blogs on the iPhone’ and swears she would miss the smell of paper and could never read off a ‘computer screen.’ And I have shown her the Sony. She either hasn’t paid attention, or it didn’t sink in 🙂
As for the woman worried about the Widdle Children, I remember my dad going through a similar phase with me when all I would read were Star Trek novels and true crime books. I wound up getting a degree in English literature. And while I do still read my share of trash, I read good stuff too. Plus ca change, no?