Flourishing

Back in April I wrote a post entitled, “Why Read?” I had been listening to Thomas Friedman making the argument that ours in a “search culture.” We don’t read so much as search out information. This, he noted, is a result of the development of new communication media like the internet which is infinitely searchable.

Inherent in Friedman’s observation is a profound alteration. We are not only changing what we read, we are changinghow we read. Or rather, we are being changed. That is the thesis of Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making us Stupid Stoopid?”

Writes Carr,

“My mind isn’t going - so far as I can tell - but it’s changing….Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. My concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Is the internet changing the way we read? It seems that it is. It is also changing the amount we read. Americans are reading more in 2008 than they read in the 1970s and 1980s. This is largely due to the growing use of email, text messages, and the internet. These are reading-based means of communication as opposed to visual means of communication, like television, which defined pop culture of the 1970s and 1980s. While we may conclude that Americans are reading more in 2008 than ever before, we cannot conclude that we are reading better.

Let’s assume that the way we read is changing. Since my own experience seems eerily similar to Carr’s, I’m a believer. A couple of days after the birth of our son on April 29, my Apple iBook G4 died and I entered a technological detox program. I was basically without a laptop for about a month (two weeks voluntarily, two weeks involuntarily). During that time I realized how much time I wasted each day simply “following links,” reading blogs, and sending emails. I also noticed how few books I had read over the last semester and how easily I was distracted when I tried to read. I had already decided that technology was the culprit and (before this) had blogged about it elsewhere. The inevitable next question is: so what?

As compelling an answer to this question as I have read comes from Tufts developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

We are not only whatwe read, we are how we read,” notes Wolf. The internet promotes a type of reading that places a premium on “efficiency” and “immediacy.” We become, “mere decoders of information.” Carr ponders whether in so doing we are losing our ability to do the deep and sustained reading that emerged with the invention of the printing press.

As evidence of the influence that technology exercises over reading and composition, Carr offers the German philosophy Friedrich Nietzsche. At some point in 1882 Nietzsche purchased and began to use a typewriter. His eyesight was failing and focusing on a page induced headaches that essentially made it impossible to write.

In correspondence between Nietzsche and a friend (a composer), his correspondent notes that Nietzsche’s writing had changed to become more terse. In reply the philosopher concedes, “You are right, our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” The shift from longhand to typewriter altered the way in which Nietzsche wrote. We may well ponder how email and the internet are affecting our communication.

The fundamental question is whether reading is information gathering, contemplation, or a little bit of both at varying times.

The technician (like Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page) see reading as accessing little stacks of information. Reading can be reduced to an algorithm. As a result, Google seeks industrial efficiency in taking people to the data they need (the right quote, the perfect figure, the exact illustration) by liberating it from the bulky construct called a book of which it typically is a part.

Artists (like playwright Richard Foreman) see reading as a participation in a grand tradition, a participation in the large tradition of which we are part. Lose this and we risk being flattened into “pancake people,” more robot than homo sapiens.

Question: The Christian faith is rooted in the story of God’s redemptive work among His people contained in the Bible. How might this trend adversely affect the reading of Scripture among the community of faith? Will the Church be one of the custodians of the “old reading” in the new wired age?