The Deep Space of Digital Reading - Nautilus

[kennyc]

The Deep Space of Digital Reading
Why we shouldn’t worry about leaving print behind.

BY PAUL LA FARGE
ILLUSTRATION BY IRENE RINALDI
JANUARY 7, 2016

In A History of Reading, the Canadian novelist and essayist Alberto Manguel describes a remarkable transformation of human consciousness, which took place around the 10th century A.D.: the advent of silent reading. Human beings have been reading for thousands of years, but in antiquity, the normal thing was to read aloud. When Augustine (the future St. Augustine) went to see his teacher, Ambrose, in Milan, in 384 A.D., he was stunned to see him looking at a book and not saying anything. With the advent of silent reading, Manguel writes,

... the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal.

To read silently is to free your mind to reflect, to remember, to question and compare. The cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf calls this freedom “the secret gift of time to think”: When the reading brain becomes able to process written symbols automatically, the thinking brain, the I, has time to go beyond those symbols, to develop itself and the culture in which it lives.


A thousand years later, critics fear that digital technology has put this gift in peril. The Internet’s flood of information, together with the distractions of social media, threaten to overwhelm the interior space of reading, stranding us in what the journalist Nicholas Carr has called “the shallows,” a frenzied flitting from one fact to the next. In Carr’s view, the “endless, mesmerizing buzz” of the Internet imperils our very being: “One of the greatest dangers we face,” he writes, “as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is ... a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity.”
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http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/the-...igital-reading

[barryem]

I just did a bit of googling about this and it seems to be believed by a lot of people and treated as a myth by a lot of others. It seems that Augustine did express surprise that Ambrose was reading silently but I wonder if that was just a custom of his time. It seems to be a mystery.

I remember reading in Plato's "Republic", decades ago, a discussion of people who read while listening to music. I suppose there's no reason that you couldn't read aloud while listening to music but the discussion was much about it drawing away concentration and focus. There's no indication here that I can recall whether the reading they discussed was silent or aloud but reading aloud and listening to music somehow seems unlikely.

Barry

[Conan46]

I don't know that there is much difference between reading digital print vs paper print. Some say you can miss the tactile experience of turning pages, but that does not seem a huge deal to me. I suspect a bigger issue, especially with kids in school, is digital note taking vs writing notes. My own experience is that I can remember something easier, and find notes quicker for review that I have written down vs just making a note in a digital text.
If the larger concern is distraction from notifications and such, the easy answer is to silence or turn off notifications or use a dedicated reading device without such distractions.