The basic premise of this book is that the broader shift to digital mediums has changed the way people process information while reading, and it also explores the implications of this change. It's an interesting concept but hardly one that seems to require a book to support the claim - isn't it obvious to anyone who has paid attention during the past decade? But then again, I suppose the past decade was the one where no one paid attention. In any event, I liked this book quite a bit and I did learn a thing or two in the process, but I'm not sure if it fulfilled the promise of its premise.
Reader Come Home by Maryanne Wolf (November 2021)
I'd never given much thought to the processing speed in the reader's brain, but after Wolf describes the mechanism in Reader Come Home I found it to be among the more memorable ideas from this reading. The result is due mostly to cell specialization within the neural network, which is honed over time to recognize written language and comprehend the various meanings contained within each grouping of words and letters. It strikes me now that the relatively more distracting features of the digital medium - such as sudden advertisements (BUY PEPSI) or those click NOW video links - may disrupt these processes... wait, what was I talking about? Anyway, I think there are too many bells and whistles on the screen to consider a digital format a direct substitute to the calm stability of the printed page, and this difference likely reduces comprehension whenever a reader opts for a digital format. It could also prove to be an obstacle for experiencing indirect insights, which Wolf suggests could be among the more profound types of realization. I suppose one way I think of this is like how you might try to hear a small sound - if the surrounding environment is quiet, you have a better chance. In this analogy, going to the digital medium is like adding noise to the experience, which makes it tougher to pick out the quiet epiphanies that can be a richly rewarding part of reading.
But as I mentioned at the top, are these such novel insights? One challenge for me was that I didn't agree with some of the baseline reference points for certain comparisons. It left me with a sense that some aspects of this work relied on a certain nostalgia for a past that I'm not convinced ever existed, at least in a general sense for the average person. One of Wolf's notes, which if I recall correctly cited one of President Obama's thoughts, identified a recent trend as one of a shift in how we think about information - no longer as a powerful tool, but rather one where it's considered a distraction or form of entertainment. I'm sure this is true to a degree, but hasn't Jeopardy! been on TV for over five decades?
Getting away from unfairly cherry-picking convenient examples, I think the idea of information representing a powerful tool might speak more to power inequalities than it does to an inherent characteristic of information. In the past, information may have represented a tool of the powerful, which in turn could be confused with information being a powerful tool, but as technology (such as the internet) creates access to information for more and more people, it reduces the relative power of information. It's no coincidence to me that some refer to this process as "the democratization of information" - it's much like how democratic systems reduce the power of any individual office by making all offices more accessible (relative to other systems of government). Having said all that, it may still be a critical point, but it's not clear to me if the effect is less about digital reading and more so about the way recent changes in technology and society have altered our relationship to information, or possibly to power. It could also be that these changes have made it less important to have the toolkit developed through deep reading, since there is less of a need to work with information until it can be formed into a powerful tool - it comes to us, with maybe one or two extra taps of a screen, in a form that makes it ready for immediate use.
It's undeniable that the ease of collecting information via bite-sized digital pieces has changed so much about life in just a few years. There is an argument that losing the skills honed through deep reading has left us vulnerable to the form of misinformation that runs rampant these days across the internet, and social media in particular. But I don't think a lack of deep reading skills explains why so many cling to misinformation about COVID vaccines, or that these people would have lined up for their shots if all of this had happened in 2000. I think serious readers sometimes overestimate how much the average person reads, particularly in the sense of those dense books that help develop thinking, reasoning, and analytical skills. The fact that I exclusively read books in print form speaks to my overall agreement with the premise, implicitly acknowledging that my processing of digital text would result in a diminished reading experience, but those who don't read like me haven't necessarily switched to digital - they likely never read books at all.
I think this is related to Wolf's important point that humans are hard-wired for novelty - the process of identifying a new stimulus leads to an addictive reward process in the brain. This was made in reference to the premise, expanding on the recent trend where so much of our attention has moved to these new digital tools. In a digital form, it's so easy to skim rather than read through information in a manner reminiscent of how prospectors scan riverbeds for promising glimmers. But there is also a temptation to novelty in the conclusion that our current moment is a unique situation, overlooking the many ways that society has had similar moments in the past. In some ways, the way we read on the phone demonstrates nothing more than a replacement for how we once read newspapers or magazines, and those were hardly the gold standards for rigorous reading experiences. I guess my longwinded point is that although the digital shift had a profound impact on the sort of person who once enjoyed cracking open dense, dusty volumes full of complex writing, this shift was much less of an event for the type of people who have forgotten that they once read the comics section as part of a daily ritual, which these days happens with one finger swiping, poking, and caressing a screen.
Ultimately, I think Reader Come Home is a book with a narrow audience, one for people like me who agree entirely that the digital shift is strangling the highest potential of our minds, but I suspect in the process of appealing to a broader audience there was an assumption made that I'm a lot like the average person. I just can't shake the memory of being in college classrooms alongside students who read one or two books a year, and I'm not concerned by the idea that the digital medium is costing these people something profound about the life experience. As far as I know, the way the average person used to read means they don't have much to lose in this shift, and in fact the process of having easier access to smaller chunks of information might prove more beneficial overall to this type of person. As Wolf suggests in the latter portion, there are ways to imagine a world where people learn to make the most of things by combining skills honed in the digital world to those associated with deeper reading, and after reflecting on it I think this outcome is not just optimistic but inevitable, for most people, having had nothing in the sense of the benefits of deeper reading, have nothing to lose in the transition away from it.
TOA Rating: Three subordinate clauses out of four
Endnotes
0) My suggestions - for cats, distract attention; for dogs, focus attention
Over the past couple of months, I found myself referencing the thought in this book that language is essentially a process of joint attention, so I wanted to make some additional remarks on the concept. The joint attention idea is a helpful way to think about how a digital instructor differs from a human, particularly in the context of teaching young children. It's pretty to clear to me that children can focus on a digital source with almost complete attention, yet measurements of task performance often conclude that children learn better from humans than from digital tools. I suspect the problem is that when an adult sees a child staring at a video, there is an assumption of comprehending and retaining the subject matter, but perhaps the reality is that the child is merely entranced by the bright lights and fast action on the screen. With a human, there is some opportunity for feedback, and this can help an adult see whether the child is paying attention to the material or simply entranced by the visual.
