There’s a decent review of the debate as to whether net addictions make us better or worse as readers and thinkers in the Sunday Times. Supposed to be the first of a series on the topic, so I’m looking forward to it. To be honest, Motoko Rich mostly gives a kind of dull rehash of the multitude of arguments I’ve traced out here over the past six months, and that a lot of other people have been engaged in and tracing out for nearly a decade now. Then again, why complain. It’s a decent overview, and traces the basic position. The internet makes us stupid, especially it makes us worse at reading books. No, the internet makes us smarter at certain things like, well, the internet and makes us better readers of things like, well, the internet. It seems to me this kind of argument has reached a stalemate, or maybe I just find it stale. As long as these are the only terms of the debate, then I think there’s likely to mostly be people yelling at each other. Maybe that explains why it’s in the NYTimes. Newspapers get folks to state the obvious positions in the dumbest ways possible in order to paint a contrast that is unresolvable, in which someone has to win and someone has to lose.
Among the more obvious inanities in the article:
Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”
Michigan State is paying this guy? [DEAR ALL, SEE MY APOLOGY TO RAND BELOW. HE DIDN'T DESERVE TO BE SINGLED OUT IN THIS WAY, AND I'M NEVER SURE WHETHER SOMETHING DUMB I DO IN A POST SHOULD BE DELETED OR LET STAND TO SHOW MY OWN LIMITATIONS. I'LL SPLIT THE DIFFERENCE BY LEAVING IT WITH THIS NOTE AND MY FURTHER COMMENTS IN THE COMMENT SECTION] Young people are unbothered by many things, including drinking excessive amounts of alcohol and driving at speeds in excess of 100 mphs. What young people are or are not troubled by is hardly a clue to anything, unless you are of the ilk that believes kids don’t need to be educated they just need older people to get out of the way. This has been tried with success in which society? But more than this, it bears the marks of all the typical inanities of this kind of discourse in its distortion of tradition forms of reading. Who ever believed thata book was transparently showing us what reality is like. Books, novels especially, self-consciously shape reality, imposing a shape on the worLd. The goal in reading and writing is to perceive a shape that can’t be otherwise perceived in the flux and motion of the everyday. it is a form of prioritizing, emphasizing, ordering, bringing in to relation. Indeed, this is what most uses of language in storytelling and ritual have always tried to do
Now, it may really be that this is a problematic thing to do, but for an educational psychologist to wave away thousands of years of human activity as somehow…well, misguided??? This is a thought?? Again, why is Michigan State paying this guy after all.
However, I think as I think I’ve already said, it’s not really helpful to cast these positions in opposition. It’s a little bit like saying you only need to work on flexibility, and you don’t need to do aerobic or anaerobic exercise. They are different things, but it’s not clear that a human being exists as fully and as well as an embodied being by having only one in comparison to having both. I do think digital literacy is important, but it is foolish to believe that human beings can do without the kinds of literacy that we’ve developed up to now and that are represented in books or other kinds of long form writing. That is, something that makes you attend, something that teaches you to care in a sustained way about something outside yourself and your immediate desires.
Anyway, enough of this. One side note, perhaps the best most helpful part of the Times piece is the reference page they supply regarding reading and the debate the is summarized in the article. A useful resource for people interested in surveying the subject, at least in its more popular and middle-brow manifestations. Alas, my blog doesn’t make the list; maybe in a future life.
About my inanity, referenced in your post. Asked why I’m advocating for the virtues of online reading when it’s so hard for people to read in a nonlinear way, I answered, no, it may be hard for some older folk, but it’s not hard for kids. Surely that matters. As for what I do, I do research on how people can use nonlinear reading and thinking to accomplish learning goals that are hard to achieve otherwise. That’s what I get paid for. And I show how it’s not as hard as some people think, even for those who are bothered by it at first. But getting some people not to be bothered by it is an important step.
Comment by Rand Spiro — July 27, 2008 @ 8:47 pm |
Hi Rand, my apologies for getting so harsh yesterday. Rereading what I wrote I think I let my frustration with the general shape of this argument get out of hand and I took it out on you–the late hour and driving all day to Boston didn’t help either. But no excuses, and so my apologies for what seems to me to be a post that probably needed a little more flame retardant. No doubt you have a great deal more to say that I should be listening to as well. I do have some doubts about the quotation in the post. It’s not clear to me that reading in books is so clearly about linearity as the quotation from you makes it sound. But even beyond that, the idea seems to say that internet surfing is somehow more “true-to-life” than traditional reading in books. I have my doubts about this, but even if it were true, I think I would have to say “so what?” Being true to life has not been what a great deal of reading and writing has been about, at least in my estimation.
Again, my apologies. I haven’t yet earned much right to speak authoritatively about any of this stuff.
Comment by Peter Kerry Powers — July 28, 2008 @ 1:05 am |
To see really exciting new multimedia literacy try out Inanimate Alice. http://www.inanimatealice.com And its a free online resource!
More an interactive piece of fiction than a traditional game, Inanimate Alice: Episode 4 continues the story of the young game animator as she leaves her home in Russia and travels abroad. Inanimate Alice serves as both entertainment and a peek into the future of literature as a fusion of multimedia technologies. The haunting images and accompanying music and text weave a remarkably gripping tale that must be experienced to be believed.
And better still for schools there is a piece of software now available that allows learners to create their own stories. Valuable for all forms of literacy and this is being sold as a perpetual site licence for schools at £99 ! http://www.istori.es
Comment by len — July 28, 2008 @ 7:58 am |
Comments at ***s below…. Rand
Hi Rand, my apologies for getting so harsh yesterday.
*** No problem. Been there and done that a time or two myself…
Rereading what I wrote I think I let my frustration with the general shape of this argument get out of hand and I took it out on you–the late hour and driving all day to Boston didn’t help either. But no excuses, and so my apologies for what seems to me to be a post that probably needed a little more flame retardant. No doubt you have a great deal more to say that I should be listening to as well. I do have some doubts about the quotation in the post. It’s not clear to me that reading in books is so clearly about linearity as the quotation from you makes it sound.
*** Online reading/learning can be much more nonlinear than books (and in ways that match the nonlinearity of the subject matter, too often seductively reduced by the single path through most books).
But even beyond that, the idea seems to say that internet surfing is somehow more “true-to-life” than traditional reading in books.
*** All my stuff is about “can be”, not “is.” And the key thing about “true to life” that I’m getting at is that the subject matter learned from books is often more complex, ill-structured, and nonlinear than can be easily portrayed in traditional media (books, lectures, etc.). So you might read what I’m saying as true to the ‘life’ of the knowledge being represented. And that’s important, because the knowledge will have to be used in more real-life ways, not in the constrained ways found in typical end of chapter/book tests.
I have my doubts about this, but even if it were true, I think I would have to say “so what?” Being true to life has not been what a great deal of reading and writing has been about, at least in my estimation.
*** Again, I’m talking about being true to the way knowledge has to be used in real life, which will often involve a situation-sensitive repackaging of different sources of knowledge and experience, in new ways, to fit the demands of new situations.
Comment by Rand Spiro — July 28, 2008 @ 5:32 pm |