Online Reading, too
Sometimes (most of the time) I think my time would be better spent reading and trying to make sense of others’ thoughts rather than committing mine to paper, but then along comes a blog posting that lets me off the hook for not always getting it right. Will Richardson’s recent post on the “Online Reading” article (and the subsequent corrections) reminded me that even the Founding Fathers probably screwed up once in a while. As many of his readers pointed out, it’s all part of being human.
If I’ve got it right, Will normally disagrees with Bauerline’s perspective, but in writing this piece, he found himself agreeing to a large extent with him. He writes,
“Bauerline argues that screen reading cannot provide those skills (to work with longer texts, to do sustained reading and thinking, to stick with complex narratives), and he argues it persuasively… This resonates. In fact, I’ve made myself take time over the last few months to read longer texts, and after plowing through three really, really engaging and challenging novels in the past month or so, I’m feeling like my brain is back in gear somehow. It’s getting closer to balance.”
I wonder whether Will agreed with Bauerline more because of the logic of his arguments, or because he thought the writer was Federman? Food for thought here, but I just love the fact that Will is also thinking about, and acting on, preserving “balance” It reaffirms for me that I’m not completely out in left field when I obsess over what I see as a loss of this balance (Devil’s Advocate, Sept.14) as we try to find time in our ever-more packed days to keep up with both traditional (read “print) reading and digital (online) skimming.
I think traditional reading is getting short-shrift here; not because it is inherently less valuable than screen reading or digital literacy, but because it doesn’t have the snap and pizazz of on-screen wizardry. In reading, the magic happens between your ears instead of in front of your eyes, and this requires real work to make it happen, and too many of us are getting either too lazy, or just to overloaded, to muster the effort it takes. It’s just too easy to pull up another TED talk on Youtube and let someone else do the talking – and thinking.
The comments to this post, from across the spectrum of opinion, are an added bonus. Real dialog, real dissent, and real thinking going on about : the very thing that Will laments for not happening when he says,
“What continues to concern me, though, is the paucity of conversation about any of this in our schools.”
Thanks, Will, and his many followers, for ensuring that this doesn’t continue to be the case.
