Short Attention Spans?

A transatlantic debate is currently raging about whether a decade of staring at computer screens, sending emails and text messages, and having our research needs serviced instantly by Google and Wikipedia, has taken a terrible toll on our attention, until our brains have been reconfigurated and can no longer adjust the tempo of our mental word-processing to let us read a book all the way through. ... The average-length novel is too much of a stretch for the time-challenged, multi-tasking, BlackBerry-prodding "entertainment consumer" to ontemplate reading, let alone the 700-page biography of VS Naipaul or Edith Wharton. Not because of the size of books, but because of the thought processes they contain.

This piece by John Walsh in the Independent (pictured below) has been preying on my mind over the last week or so. Is it true that our internet us is shortening our attention spans alarmingly to the extent that we cannot read as effectively as we could before? (That reading skills are changing in the internet age is something we have, of course, discussed before.)

My page-hopping- hyperlink clicking-YouTube-downloading self wonders if it might be true ... and doesn't necessarily want to hear the answer.

These days I have to make it a point to get right away from the screen (which actually means leaving the house least my itchy fingers draw me back to the keyboard!) for extended stretches of time so that I can get some serious (book) reading done. I don't know why, but I feel that I am finding focusing on the written word off-screen harder ... hitherto I'd put it down to senility creeeping in! And I thought it was just me!

But in excellent piece (which honestly, you must read) called Is Google Making Us Stupid? in the Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr writes :

When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon.

So friends, how are your heads these days?

Digital Literacy?

As teenagers' scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading - diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager ... who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text.

Some months ago I posted a link to Matthew Kirschenbaum's article about the changing nature of reading in this wired age. Now Motoko Rich in the International Herald Tribune updates us on the debate being played out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world.

The big question, does literacy need to be redefined?

What Counts as Reading?

Matthew Kirschenbaum in the Australian (in a piece which originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education) argues that with the coming of new technology (particularly developments with Google and Amazon's Kindle), our reading habits just cannot be judged according to old criteria.

He sets out, he says, not to debunk the US National Endowment for the Arts report To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence released last month (very scary reading indeed), which:

... synthesises a number of studies to conclude that Americans, especially younger ones, are reading less, that they are reading less well and that these trends have disturbing implications for culture, civics and the national economy

Rather, he sets out to explore the fact that:

... reading and conversations about reading are in a state of flux.

He makes the point that we tend to value reading in depth rather more than the equally valid reading laterally (i.e. across a much larger number of sources, comparing and cross-checking).

He points out the the NEA report is very much concerned with the reading of novels and other literary works. Yet, he says, in historical terms this is a relatively recent phenomena:

Until well into the 19th century, novel reading was regarded in Europe as a pastime fit mostly for women and the indolent, and a potentially dangerous one, as women in particular could not be trusted to distinguish fiction from reality.

He also asks:

...what it means to read and what it means to have read something. When can we claim a book has been read? What is the dividing line between reading and skimming? Must we consume a book in its entirety - start to finish, cover to cover - to say we have read it?

The question is one I ponder constantly. I seem to be increasingly dipping into books, and I speed read most non-fiction. But I do slow right down to enjoy fiction when its well-written, even reading the same passage several times over.

We need to teach out kids in schools how to become flexible readers, able to enjoy the full richness of fiction, but equally at home carrying out tasks like consulting a variety of reference sources online, and reading for gist.

Book literacy as well as screen literacy. Both.

And organisations like the National Library which commission reading studies need to encourage researchers to take this variety into account as well, instead of measuring reading solely by the vague criteria of numbers of books read. (How do they measure anything? The last survey as far as I know is still a state secret when it should be available for the scrutiny of all interested parties!)

Is reading on screen any less valid that reading on paper? Kirschenbaum doesn't think so:

... anecdotally my instinct is that computer users are capable of projecting the same aura of deep concentration as the stereotypical bookworm.

Particularly when their first reaction to an online text is to talk back to it!

Now where did the whole bloody morning go?

(Kirschenbaum's blog, incidentally, is here.)

Postscript:

A very interesting response to Kirshenbaum's piece on the If:Book blog with a whole lot of good discussion in the comments.

(Painting by La tartine gourmand)