Quote:
Originally Posted by HappyMartin
So it seems that we are all succumbing to the disease of short attention spans. Is there anything other than anecdotal evidence to support this theory?
|
Well, there is this in the article:
Quote:
In 1994, an American academic called Sven Birkerts published a seminal study, "The Gutenberg Elegies: the Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age". Before plunging into the page vs screen debate, he recalled his experience of teaching a course on "the American short story" to a class of undergraduates. They tackled Henry James's story "Brooksmith", and hated it. Was it, asked Birkerts, the language, the style, the syntax? All of those, said the students. It turned out they were defeated by everything that James was trying to communicate. The narrative river of thoughts wasn't one on which they could sail. The subtle moral distinctions between characters, the importance of their choices in the society through which they moved – it wasn't just that the students found such things old-fashioned; they couldn't grasp them at all.
Birkerts found that, as watchers of TV and videos, "they had difficulty slowing down enough to concentrate on prose of any density; they had problems with what they thought of as archaic diction, with allusions, with vocabulary that seemed 'pretentious'; they were especially uncomfortable with indirect or interior passages, indeed with any deviations from straight plot; and they were put off by an ironic tone, because it flaunted superiority and made them feel they were missing something." It dawned on Birkerts that a whole generation of young American readers were becoming gradually decoupled from the whole culture of the written word.
|