Read to Your Bunny

A recent article in the NYTimes on reading, literacy, and the internet has gotten me thinking about these subjects again. The article summarizes a debate among educators about the value of the internet to reading skills and literacy rates. The proponents suggest that challenged readers, such as people with dyslexia and those who do not generally read, benefit from the format of the web as well as using the internet for entertainment instead of television. Also, they say, students are learning a new set of literacy skills, which will be valuable in the digital age. Detractors posit that internet experiences have done nothing to enhance literacy rates and that even students digital literacy in the U.S. is relatively poor. In fact, detractors suggest that digital reading experiences--with reader's pick-and-choose mentality and relatively short reading passages--have contributed to the dumbing down of America.

Now, I'm not an expert on reading or the history of literacy, but the current obsession over reading, particularly novels, strikes me as curious. Until about 150 years ago, novels were anathema, seen in much the same way that, say, People Magazine is seen today. Sure, it's writing but it's not good for you and really, only women read that anyway (which in part is why it took novels so long to gain acceptance--men read history, philosophy, even poetry, but not novels! Do men read People? or Us? Or Harlequin romances?). Indeed, the novel in its present form only really began in the late 18th century anyway, at a time when poetry, as well as what we would call non-fiction, held sway. No one today, though, really worries about the consumption of poetry by current students (unless it's the various poetry groups). But novels are the literary art form of the 20th century, the period in which all of today's educators and thinkers came of age. So, there is a pro-novel bias.

The bias often extends to an anti-television, anti-digital, anti-new media stance. These media are secondary to the printed word, particularly the novel. But I believe this is just an ignorant prejudice born of the intellectual snobbery of a specific time. Just like the people who derided Dickens, we are not seeing the trees for the forest. Certainly, I value book reading--I've written one, though an unpublished one (my 210+ page dissertation), for which I read literally hundreds of books--but I believe that internet, television, and other digital media literacy will be as important or even more so than traditional book-length reading (I am, of course, an art historian, and often think visual literacy--which plays a bigger part in analyzing tv and new media--gets ignored in favor of the written word. Truth be told, visual literacy was long the dominant skill of people). It is the world we live in now. Most jobs no longer require those types of readings skills; recreation certainly doesn't. Author David McColllough bemoans “Learning is not to be found on a printout. It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.” Of course, learning is not the goal of most people; employment or entertainment is. And, the "precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books" has been replaced by a faster, perhaps even more democratic, popular culture shared through the web and MP3 players and television. That doesn't make it right, or better, of course, but it is what it is. Now, if you want to argue that we should go back to a pre-digital, text-based age (like that of the centuries before us) . . . well, I think you probably wouldn't be reading this anyway.

Like author Nicholas Carr, I realize "what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation." Apparently, neuroscientists concur--reading effects our brain circuitry: change how we read, change our brains. Indeed, the academic in me--the reader--is appalled by the lack of logsitical progression or internal coherence in my discussion here. But the tv is on and I don't have time to craft a persuasive argument or even correct grammar (note the over-reliance on ellipses and parentheses). I just want to ruminate, casually, on the article at hand. That, of course, detractors would say, is the very problem with the internet--and the writing found here.