Have Students Really Lost the Ability to Read Deeply

My adult daughter, who teaches 9th grade Humanities at High Tech High, dropped by last night. I am sorting through books I don't want on my shelves anymore, and I always like to offer them to her. Two of my three children have inherited the obsession to purchase and hold on to books we have read, as though having the book on the shelf means that the ideas contained within them are ours forever. She was super excited that I had found some of her textbooks from college. She can use them in her classroom or in future research.

We like to share ideas we have been reading about and so we began talking about some of the concepts from this class.

She mentioned that teaching reading and reading comprehension to students is one of the hardest parts of her job. Her students just don't read deeply. They don't want to spend time understanding the books they are assigned. She suggested that exposure to new medias might be part of the problem.

Maybe.

On the other hand, I know all kinds of people who never read a book in high school. They wrote reports based on cliff notes or reading the back covers of books.

And they did that before the internet was invented.

Prophecies

In 1971, my mother enrolled my brothers in the Fundamental School, a public elementary school that promised to focus on the three R’s, reading, writing, and arithmetic. I’m not sure how their elementary school experience was different than the one my sister and I had, but my mom was hopeful that they would get a better, more focused education in an environment that didn’t spend time creating wall murals on butcher paper. For what it’s worth, we were all good students and did more or less the same in high school and college.

My mom’s concerns were not unique. Rudolph Flesch’s 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read—and What You Can Do About It is still in print and is available on Amazon for only $10.40. It’s sort of odd that I am familiar with the title of a book published before I was born and that people younger than me are blogging about exactly this phrase. It seems that education hasn’t improved much since Flesch’s book—or at least the market for books about the dismal state of education is still pretty healthy.

As a result, I’m not terribly alarmed by the ominous prophecies in our readings.

It seems like someone is always complaining that young people just aren’t the same as they used to be. In “Teaching and Reading the Millennial Generation through Media Literacy,” 2007 article published in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, David Considine observed that in “times of rapid technological change, it has been typical for adults to criticize the academic achievement and work ethic of their own children” (471). He noted that this has been going for thousands of years and even Greek philosopher Socrates was critical Athenian teenagers and their deficient education.

Sven Birkerts’ 1994 book entitled The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age is equally alarmist, claiming that “our students are less and less able to read, or analyze, or write with clarity and purpose” (119).

Stephen Johnson’s April 2009 article “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write,” published in the Wall Street Journal, states that that instant web access “may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge,” but predicts that it is “not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21^st-century resources, attention” (2).

Similarly, in his 2008 Atlantic Online article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Carr suggests that the internet seems to be “chipping away at [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation” (2).

He cites Bruce Friedman, a pathologist and member of the faculty at the University of Michigan Medical School, who complained of a “staccato” quality in his thinking as a result of scanning short passages from online texts. He says he can no longer read War and Peace.

I have never read War and Peace. I tried, but, like Friedman, I couldn’t concentrate. Sadly, I can’t blame the internet for my inability to engage the text. Small children and laundry are significant distractions. So is 19^th century prose. Most of us just don’t think that way anymore.

Is that wrong? Does that demonstrate holes in our education, or is it a sign of something else?

In my other reality, the one outside academia, not everyone cares about history and most people don’t read classics in their spare time

They also don’t think about old or new media literacies or how those technologies influence the way they think.

Technology is part of life, and most people use whatever technologies work best.

Carr cites developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf, who notes that reading “is not an instinctive skill for human beings” and it’s “not etched into our genes the way speech is” (3).

It’s true.

Our culture had to transition from an oral to a written tradition. It took thousands of years for reading and writing to become such a part of the fabric of life that we take it for granted that all men and women should learn.

We’ve been reading about the development of the printed word and the ways this development has changed the way we think, the way we respond to each other, the way we process information, the way we generate new discoveries.

That development has brought us to this point.

It has brought us to new technologies that once again are changing the way we think, respond to each other, the way we process information, and the way we generate new discoveries.

Just like the new technology of print privileged certain ideologies, strengths, and learning modalities these new media technologies privilege certain ideologies, strengths, and learning modalities. The hierarchies have not been erased; new hierarchies have been created.

After touting the utopian Wikipedia goals of “shared principles” and the “focus on neutrality,” Henry Jenkins acknowledged that the “decentralized nature of knowledge production . . . results in some surprising gaps and excesses” (3). Science fiction authors are apparently more interesting to Wikipedia contributors than dead presidents.

And although Wikipedia has become pretty standard, the “participatory culture” that Jenkins celebrates only includes a small percentage of users.

Still, it is hard to believe that the ability to concentrate has been lost when the rate of technological innovation has increased exponentially.

It’s not gone—it’s just different.

After sounding an alarm, Carr concedes that we should be skeptical of his skepticism (6). After all, a similar alarm was sounded when writing threatened the status quo.

“Teaching and Reading the Millennial Generation through Media Literacy.” David Considine, Julie Horton, Gary Moorman Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Vol. 52, No. 6 (Mar., 2009), pp. 471-481 Published by: International Reading Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20468390 Accessed: October 26, 2009.

Seven Hours of Debate? No, Thank You

Neil Postman “The Typographic Mind”

Nicholas Carr “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Neil Postman informs us that the famous Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858 lasted seven hours and the audience was willing to “cheerfully accommodate themselves” (1) to the long oratory. The asks the obvious question: “What kind of audience was this?”

I’ve been judging high school debate for 1999. Team policy rounds consist of four eight-minute constructive speeches and four five-minute rebuttal speeches. Lincoln-Douglas value debates are shorter, lasting a total of 40 minutes including prep time and cross-examination. Sometimes I have to force myself to stay awake, especially if I’ve judged consecutive rounds.

Speeches by most professional politicians aren’t any better, but I can walk away from the television when I listen to those.

I pay attention to lectures by taking copious notes. If I don’t take notes, I am unlikely to understand what it is being said.

Obviously, I am not like the 1858 audience. Very few of us are. We have changed.

Postman explains that “people of a television culture,” like myself, need “’plain language’ both aurally and visually” (2). He suggests that there is something else going on as well.

He points out the fact that “the written word, and an oratory based upon it, has a content: a semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content” (2). It makes claims and asserts ideas. In other words, it has a “meaning which demands to be understood” (2).

Or at least it should have meaning that demands understanding.

Postman argues that “much of our discourse today has only a marginal propositional content,” leading to our increasing inability to listen to seven-hour debates. He illustrates his argument by comparing advertising claims from the eighteenth century, which provided detailed claims and information, to the catchy advertising slogans of the present that basically say nothing. He describes American television which requires “minimal skills” (3) for comprehension, but which is “pleasing to the eye and accompanied by exciting music” with “the best photography in the world” (3).

He extends his argument and states that the “problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining” (3).

He cites the example of WINS, an old New York City radio station, that used to tell listeners, “Give us twenty-two minutes and we’ll give you the world” (5). Postman points out that this is said without irony, as if the audience believes it can really be gone.

There is a reason why we used to call television the “idiot box.” But has it really transformed us into a culture without meaning, or is there something else going on?

In his article “Watching TV Makes You Smarter,” Steven Johnson argues that new media, including television, is causing us to develop new cognitive abilities and that the “growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple treading, flashing arrows and social networks” (216).

I’m not sure.

Nicholas Carr suggests a different causation for our lack of focus in his Atlantic Online article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” from 2008. He celebrates internet research, the “advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information” (2), but says that the “Net seems to . . . [be] chipping away at [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation” (2). He says he is not alone. He quotes Bruce Friedman, who stated, “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print” (2). He claims that his thoughts have taken on a “staccato” quality, and he has lost the ability to read books like War and Peace.

Carr asserts that the “human brain is almost infinitely malleable” (3), that it adapts to the technologies we use. Did Nietzsche’s writing really change when he began using a typewriter? (3). And does use of the Internet affect our cognition? Does Google’s ability to understand “exactly what you mean” and “give you back exactly what you want” shut down some cognitive process in our minds? (5).

Carr sends us back to Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates worried about the development of writing, concerned that it would erode our memories and eliminate the need for dialectic.

The proliferation of writing as a technology has indeed changed us, but we depend on it too much to ever give it up. The way we learn, the way we process information, is constantly changing. We don’t want to listen to seven-hour speeches. We have better things to do.We may not read War and Peace voluntarily.

Whether we like it or not, the adoption of technology transforms us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Johnson, Steven. “Watching TV Makes You Smarter.” They Say/I Say. Ed. Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russel Durst. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc, 2009. Print.

Distribution Changes and the Revolution of the Printing Press

Ronald J. Deibert: “Print and the Medieval to Modern World Order Transformation: Distributional Changes”

I went to breakfast in North Park on Saturday morning, and as my daughter and I were headed home, we saw that a used bookstore on Adams Avenue was going out of business. Everything was 75 percent off—except for the books that were marked at 50 cents apiece or three for a dollar. We flipped a U-turn and went in. Thousands of books. Fabulous books. Familiar and unknown. About every topic imaginable. And I wished I could take boxes of them home with me. Except that I have more books than I have space and am starting to feel like I should get rid of some of them.

I don’t know why the store was closing. The owners seemed sad, and both my daughter and I felt awkward asking.

As we walked away, we wondered what the owners would do with the books after it closed. And we talked about the stacks of books at both our houses and the advent of new technologies like Kindle that eliminate the need to store books and use up valuable resources and how reading on a screen influences the way we think and respond to text.

We are book lovers, and yet we understand that we can’t keep or own every book we want to read. It is not economically or logistically feasible. Sometimes it just makes more sense to access written texts online.

The more we do, the more comfortable we are with the technology and the more likely we are to access texts online for something else.

Production and distribution of information is changing, and I am not always comfortable with the change.

I love bookstores and libraries. Books on shelves make me want to read. And I feel sorry for the bookstore owners who must reinvent their lives.

We’ve been reading about the technology of writing and how it has affected our thought processes, the ways it allows us to build on ideas progressively over time, the ways it changes memory, the ways it distances us from each other, and the ways it changes political power structures (Young and Sullivan, Ong, Havelock, Boroditsky, Lupton and Miller, Zimmer), but Ronald Deibert’s chapter takes us in a new direction.

Deibert argues that distributional changes, specifically the printing press, “undercut some social forces while they advance the interests of others” (67). His project is to examine the ways that that these “distributional changes associated with the development of printing played a part in the medieval-to-modern world order transformation in Europe” (67). He focuses on the ways that the printing press privileged the message of the Protestant Reformation, the advancement of scientific humanism, and the development of the modern political order, disadvantaging the Roman Catholic Church, absolute monarchy, and feudalism.

Luther and Calvin were not the first to disagree with the Church. Without the printing press, however, Deibert tells us “the Church had been relatively successful in squelching and containing heresies” (69). The printing press provided the opportunity “for one person to reach a mass audience . . . in an unprecedentedly short period of time” (70). Communities that were already weary of “deteriorating economic and social conditions” (70) were ready for change. Writers published in the vernacular, rather than Latin, the language of the Roman Catholic Church, making their messages easily understood by the common man. Those who could read, shared the message with those who could not. Mass production of the Bible, also published in the vernacular rather than Latin, also “helped to undermine the legitimacy of centralized knowledge reproduction” (72). The Church was no longer the sole spokesman for God. Indeed, the role of the clergy changed significantly with Protestantism because printing provided “a new channel of communication, linking Christians to their God” directly (74).

The Church forbade Catholic printers from entering into the new market for pamphlets and Bibles and put them at a serious economic disadvantage. They begged the church for permission, arguing that they would lose their houses and their livelihoods because they were only allowed to print Catholic literature, which they said “is desired by no one and cannot be given away” (74).

Similarly, the principles of scientific humanism began prior to the invention of the printing press. Deibert describes the development of universities in the Middle Ages, creating a market for books and a need for university manuscript copying centers, a slow, tedious, error-prone method of retaining knowledge. The printing press allowed for rapid delivery and the interchange of scientific ideas. Moreover, the volume of information led to “the desire to catalogue and organize every topic into a consistent order” (77), and the development of new concepts like page numbers, section breaks, or index cards.

Walter Ong argues that writing provides distance, separating “interpretation from data,” (“Writing is a Technology” 25) and “academic learning . . . from wisdom . . . making possible the conveyance of highly organized abstract thought structures . . .” (27). In this way, scientific humanism’s insistence on analytical, detached scientific observation was also favored by the move away from orality and privileged by the printing press.

It is easy for me to dismiss the incremental nature of these developments. When I’ve read about Guttenberg’s press in the past, I remember a date and move on.

However, it is important not to skim over the ways this technology radically changed the way information is communicated, stored, and perceived, the ways it turned the existing world order upside down.

The rise of new media, new ways of producing and distributing texts, new, more visual modes of communication, has the potential to do the same.

Renvois and L'Encyclopédie

Michael Zimmer: “Renvois of the past, present and future: hyperlinks and the structuring of knowledge from the Encyclopédie to Web 2.0”

The first think I did when I started to read Zimmer’s article was to look up renvois on dictionary.com. I was pretty sure our text had nothing to do with expelling diplomats from foreign countries, and the dictionary’s word was spelled without an “s.” I thought I remembered that renvoyer meant to send back, but it’s been twenty years since I studied French so I looked that up too.

Mostly my searches were a waste of time.

I remember reading about Diderot’s L’Encyclopédie in a French literature class I took in high school, but don’t remember reading anything about renvois. I knew that L’Encyclopédie was one of the first encyclopedias, and I wasn’t impressed. Every middle class family in the 1970s had at least one set of encyclopedias. We had four at our house, the regular encyclopedia and three specialized sets. I certainly didn’t regard them as “potential sites of power for the control of knowledge” (97).

As for renvois, if any book had talked about it, I wouldn’t have paid too much attention to that either. Cross-references make sense to me. You learn one thing, but you need to know another, and then another. So you look them up. In the beginning, I used the suggestions at the end of encyclopedia articles, but after a while I didn’t need them. I knew what additional information I would need to develop a deeper understanding of a topic.

In the old days, we pored through big green stacks of Readers Guides, looking for related magazine or journal articles, thumbed through card catalogs, looking up authors and topics, and then walked the aisles of the library, hoping the book was there and had been returned to its rightful place in the Dewey decimal system.

Findings things out is pretty easy now--if I come across an unfamiliar words or phrases, I can look them it up online. If I am curious about a source that was referenced in a book or journal, I can normally find it through a library database. Google is my friend. Sure, not every link is useful, but I can figure that out pretty quickly.

Cross referencing makes sense to me. Everything I learn demonstrates a previously unknown gap of understanding or knowledge so I look it up. The printed word doesn’t really “define and solidify the organization and presentation of knowledge,” as Eistenstein asserted; it merely leads us to recognize what J. David Bolter described as “associative relationships [that] define alternative organizations of knowledge” (96). If we are looking for them.

Not everybody does.

I know that.

But I sort of like being the one who can add needed information to a conversation.

And so I collect all kinds of us seemingly useless information about topics that interest me.

Zimmer’s history of encyclopedias, encyclopedic organization, and the development of renvois, and the role Diderot played in collecting “all the knowledge previously held by a privileged few into one public work accessible to all” might fall into this category except that it reminds me of the many ways that knowledge and the power it contains has been used to control men and women. By including the métiers, he elevated the status of workers across France.

Zimmer suggests that this inclusion led to the political changes that followed in that nation. He quotes Stockwell, who wrote, “By taking craftsmanship seriously for the first time, Diderot helped set in motion the downfall of the royal family and the rigid class system. Suddenly, in the pages of the Encyclopédie, every person became the equal of every other . . .” (103).

Moreover, the use of cross-references allowed him to insert information that had previously been withheld from the public, information that threatened intellectual and religious seats of authority. “For example, comments on injustice to the poor were hidden in articles on such mundane things as salt, while objectionable concepts such as ‘fornication’ were scattered among unrelated terminology in articles of theology” (103).

Zimmer asserts that L’ Encyclopédie was most subversive because its juxtaposition of opposing ideas or arguments, thus exposing “concealed relationships between controversial issues or hidden links between disparate pieces of knowledge” (103). Instead of being told what was true, readers were now required to create their own interpretations “of the differences or contradictions they might encounter” (104).

If only it were that easy.

We are currently living in a time of seemingly infinite sources of information available to us. We are saturated.

The juxtaposition of opposing ideas and arguments is everywhere.

And yet I’m not sure we care.

It’s almost like we only see what we already agree with.

Searching out knowledge and understanding takes time, and we’re not always diligent to examine all sides of an issue.

Embedded hyperlinks are designed to make it easy, to send us to related sources so that we don’t have to develop our own “associative relationships” (96).

Honestly, I rarely click on them. I find them manipulative.

Rather than assisting me in becoming an “active an integral” participant “in the production of knowledge” (Zimmer 97), I feel like they make me a passive follower of predetermined cues.

I don’t need or want an author or an editor to tell me where to look to find answers that may only communicate a single perspective.