Tag Archives: reading

Blog

Teh intarwub – still killing reading, apparently, despite the evidence otherwise

3 Comments

rabbit reading emailO NOES!!!1 Teh webz be steelin ur brain-bukkitz! This doom-mongering about the internet and its insidious power to erode literacy just never seems to go out of fashion with opinion columns, but I’m surprised to find this one on The Guardian‘s technology blog, courtesy of one Naomi Alderman. Here’s a few choice snippets (because, y’know, I doubt you can be bothered to read the whole thing):

… reading on the internet isn’t the same as reading a book. Recent studies have indicated that online reading tends to break down in the face of “texts that require steady focus and linear attention”. University teacher friends have told me that some of their freshers have started to write in a similar fashion to the way we apparently read online. All the right keywords are in the right paragraphs, but the sentences don’t follow on coherently from each other. Their essays are meant to be skimmed, not read.

[snip]

My family is fortunate to have preserved some of the hundreds of letters my grandmother exchanged with her brothers, Alan and Henry, while they were fighting in the second world war. They didn’t write these letters to improve their skills in comprehension and composition; they did it because it was the only way to stay in touch. If they’d had mobile phones and been able to call each other every day, I’m sure they’d have done so.

Blah blah blah. TL; DR, complete with a reference to WW2 to shame us in the light of the sacrifices of our elders, who had the dignity to sit in muddy trenches writing letters while they waited to be shot to burger meat. But for the classic “everything was better in the old days” capstone quote:

But while I hate to side with the neophobes I can’t help feeling a little concerned; as the loss of the ancient Greek oral culture shows, ways of thinking and using our brains can disappear for good.

YA RLY; new ways of thinking are always bad news, aren’t they? Hey, if it hadn’t been for those damned Greeks and their progressive philosophies, we’d still be sat in little stone houses thinking that lightning storms were the gods playing war… how far we’ve fallen since then! [image by tm lv]

Blog

Some cheering statistics on reading, literacy and the intertubes

girl reading a bookHere’s some cheery news to balance out the doom’n’gloom of publishing industry lay-offs and bookstore chain incompetence. According to a report from the United States National Endowment for the Arts, 84% of readers who read material online or downloaded from the web are still reading printed books, and furthermore the absolute number of literature readers in the US has grown by 16.6million; this is the first increase in over two decades, and reflects a rise much greater than simple population expansion. Something to smile about, no? [via Mediabistro/Galleycat; image by shaycam]

Blog

O NOES teh intertubes R killin ur litracy!!!1 (yes, again)

5 Comments

stacks of booksAnother six months passes, and yet again it’s time to fire up the already-old (and probably unwinnable) argument over whether or not the all-pervasive power of TEH INTERNETS is eroding morals and family values contributing to the decline and fall of the Holy Roman Empire vaguely connected to the perceived decline in literacy in developed nations. [image by austinevan]

To be fair, this New York Times piece is pretty balanced, and the only sensationalist moments it contains are the wild-eyed proclamations of the old guard:

Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.

Right, of course. And if it hadn’t been for the decadent influence of the gramophone, the Great War would never have happened! Damn kids, get off my lawn! And don’t bring up shifting educational standards again – it’s high time you learned not to talk back to your elders!

Sheesh. I expect it’s a case of “seek and you shall find” with these people, to be honest. After all, people have been lamenting the decline of the younger generation since Plato, and we seem to have made it quite a way since then.

What about you, dear readers? Has following Futurismic turned your grey matter green?

Blog

Bookworms have stronger people skills

5 Comments

The Bookworm I have occasionally wondered, as I write fiction, if what I am doing is really a particularly worthwhile way to spend my time. Shouldn’t I be off actually, you know, building something? Inventing something? Saving the planet?

Via Blogowych, I am encouraged to learn from Toronto’s Globe and Mail that:

A group of Toronto researchers have compiled a body of evidence showing that bookworms have exceptionally strong people skills.

Their years of research – summed up in the current issue of New Scientist magazine – has shown readers of narrative fiction scored higher on tests of empathy and social acumen than those who read non-fiction texts. And follow-up research showed that reading fiction may help fine-tune these skills: People assigned to read a New Yorker short story did better on social reasoning tests than those who read an essay from the same magazine.

Those benefits, researchers say, may be because fiction acts as a type of simulator. Reading about make-believe people having make-believe adventures or whirlwind romances may actually help people navigate those trials in real life.

And, yes, science fiction gets mentioned, although in that usual sort of “ooh, how icky” tone one encounters so often in news stories:

And do sci-fi tales about chasing aliens through the galaxy have the same benefits as Alice Munro’s short stories about love and loss?

This is a false dichotomy, of course. A story about chasing aliens through the galaxy can as easily be about love and loss as a story set in the here-and-now.

Besides, I’d argue that if one of the benefits of mundane fiction is that it acts as a “type of simulator” of real life, then one of the benefits of science fiction (oddly enough, maybe even in particular so-called Mundane SF) is that it acts as a type of simulator of how life may be affected by the never-ending and accelerating onslaught of the effects of technological change. So even if science fiction fans may not necessarily have exceptionally strong people skills (and certainly I’ve met a few at conventions who most emphatically did not), they may just possibly have exceptionally strong skills in other important areas, like adjusting to cultural upheavals and dealing with new technology.

And also exceptionally strong alien-chasing skills, of course. You never know when those might come in handy.

(Image: The Bookworm by Carl Spitzweg.)

[tags]books, science fiction, reading, psychology[/tags]

Blog

Internet = Short Attention Spans

7 Comments

hardwired io9’s Michael Reilly linked to an article in The Atlantic, written by Nicholas Carr on how the Internet is changing our reading habits. Michael summed it up in the following line:

The internet is giving us a form of ADHD when it comes to reading, and we should be scared of that.

Ok, Carr does mention the first half of Michael’s point in his article:

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

But the second half of Michael’s point is more or less implied by his view of Carr’s article.  Carr doesn’t try to inject this opinion into the piece, IMHO, but looks at the question from different angles to patch together a picture of how we’re changing in response to new forms of media.  He mentions anecdotes, and expresses professional opinions of sociologists, media mavens, bloggers, and neuroscientists.  

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

This article is well worth a read, if not for Carr’s anecdotes, then for the interesting behavioral points addressed by Carr.  Speaking from experience, I don’t find that the Internet has affected my ability to read for pleasure.  Reading long dry books has always been hard for me, and of course the Internet can be a distraction (so what else is new?). What about Futurismic readers, do you find it hard to read longer works because you’ve gotten used to reading short short text bits on the Internet?  Or, are you like me, the type who can balance reading weighty novels with a daily diet of RSS feeds?

[image by twenty_questions]