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.

In “Proust and the Squid”, Maryanne Wolf raises a host of questions about the future of the reading brain as a result of the the move to “digital literacy”, and conversely, about the future of reading as a possible consequence of these potential changes in the brain. She is careful to draw no conclusions, but her questions are grist for mill of many philosophical meanderings.

Wolf lays out the basic questions in her introduction, p. 22

• “What is being lost and what is being gained for so many young people who have largely replaced books with the multidimensional “continuous partial attention” culture of the Internet?’
• “What are the implications of seemingly limitlesss information for the evolution of the reading brain for us and for the species?”
• “Does the rapid, almost insantaneous presentation of expansive informaton threaten the more time-demanding formation of in-depth knowledge?”

Near the end of the book, on p. 213, she quotes Ray Kurzweil in his belief that;

• “We can have confidence that we will have the data-gathering and computational tools needed by bye 2020’s to model and simulate the entire brain,…” and
• “We will also benefit from the inherent strength of machines in storing, retrieving, and quickly sharing massive amounts of information.”

From this, however, Wolf concludes, not that the results will all be rosy and should such come to pass with all possible speed, but instead, that;

• “One thing we can imagine is that our capacities for good and for destruction will also be exponentially increased. If we are to prepare for such a future, our ability to make profound choices must be honed witha  rigor rarely practiced by learners in past generations.”  and;
• (Wolf) differ(s) with Kurzweil’s impicit assumption that an exponential acceleration of thought processes is altogether positive. In music, in poetry, and in life, the rest, the pause, the slow movements are essential to comprehending the whole.”

Socrates would, (pause ) I think, concur with Wolf’s final point…

So what do we do with these questions? Well, speaking for myself only, I read articles like Mark Bauerlein’s Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind and look for significant congruence between his questions and those Wolf raises. I read each new piece with a gradually expanding awareness, and perhaps, a slightly more anaylytical perspective – “edging ahead”, as it were, in my thinking.

I hope that in examining carefully all sides of the issues, that I will be both critical of past failings and discerning of both the promise and the peril of future possibilities. I hope, in short, to become a more informed learner, and so a better mentor to the students in my charge.

I’m relieved to know that I’m in good company when I wonder whether jumping onto the digital literacy bandwagon  has any obvious downsides. When Maryanne Wolf’s “Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain” was released on Audible.com last week, and after reading the reviews in the California Literary Review  and in the Guardian (thank you, Google!),  I couldn’t resist. Would Wolf shed some light on my ambivalence toward the latest incarnation of instant messaging and social networking? Would her conclusions about Socrates’s fears for the future of the “thinking mind” with the advent of written literature help me more unconditionally embrace the new technologies that I fear are threatening a traditional love of reading?

I bought the audio download and over the long weekend just past I listened to the full 8 hours and change once, and Chapter 1 and 9 (the introduction and conclusion) twice. Several chapters are rather tough sledding through the study of memory, reading and intellectual analysis at the molecular level, and much of the book is devoted to the study of dyslexia, a topic I find relevant and important, but not as compelling to me as the overarching issues involving the future of reading for all, dyslexic or not. Wolf’s analysis of Socrates’s fears (introduced in Chapter 1 and revisited in Chapter 9) alone, is worth the price of purchase.

To be sure, if I had tried to read this book in the traditional print format, I never would have made to the end. Having listened through, however, I’ve now dropped a copy in my Amazon shopping cart and I really do want to dig into what she says in a format where I can take the time to really absorb what she’s saying; to internalize the questions she raises and the conclusions she offers, and to incorporate these fully into my personal schema for understanding a little better what motivates my students to read.  For me, and, according to Wolf, that format is, and should continue to be, print.

PD Smith (the Guardian) says it better than I could. Until I can get my own copy of “Proust and the Squid”, I’ll close this post with Smith’s summation of what is, for me, the most compelling issues Wolf raises.

” But in the “Google universe”, with its instant over-abundance of information, how we read is being changed fundamentally. On-screen texts are not read “inferentially, analytically and critically”; they are skimmed and filleted, cherry-picked for half-grasped truths. By doing this we risk losing the “associative dimension” to reading, those precious moments when you venture beyond the words of a text and glimpse new intellectual horizons. Although not opposed to the internet, Wolf concludes on a cautionary note: we need to be “vigilant” in order to preserve “the profound generativity of the reading brain”.

And so, onward, promoting digital literacy in my library as an adjunct to, rather than a replacement for, traditional reading.