At the beginning of every semester, I ask my students to be diligent and earnest in their reading and research. “Go into the library,” I say. “Smell the books. Use them as resources.”
But according to this article in The Atlantic, it may be increasingly difficult for my students–and all the rest of us–to appreciate text the way we did in the years before the Internet.
The article points to research that indicates we aren’t even hardwired for reading; that is, text doesn’t come to us as naturally as speech. We read and write against our very natures, and we’ve been doing it for centuries. That is a triumph.
And, yes, we read more now than we did 20 years ago, but what kind of reading are we doing? Is there a “right” way to read? Should I panic at the very idea that technology is causing a change in the way our brains work–and ultimately in the way we interpret text and reality? I certainly feel like panicking when a handful of my students confess they only read Facebook.
But when I take a moment to stop panicking, I appreciate this new way of seeing, this new way to understand the written word. This moment, of course, is fleeting. It’s much easier–and much more wicked fun–to imagine my brain transforming into a series of colored wires and tubes.