The New Literacy and The Enemies Of The Future

by Stowe Boyd, San Francisco

As usual, the forces of centrality are fighting against the wrong opponents. Instead of being happy that kids are spending less time watching television and more time engaged in social activities through the web, everyone, including Motoko Rich in today's NY Times, wants to fight a 20th century war all over again, and gripe about kids not reading books.

[Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com]

Children are clearly spending more time on the Internet. In a study of 2,032 representative 8- to 18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half used the Internet on a typical day in 2004, up from just under a quarter in 1999. The average time these children spent online on a typical day rose to one hour and 41 minutes in 2004, from 46 minutes in 1999.

And every minute is a minute not spent watching TV, note.

Don't get me wrong. I am all for traditional reading -- as in reading books. I am aware that reading comprehension is valued by employers, and forms the basis of contemporary notions of higher education.

Nicholas Carr and a long list of other media curmudgeons have argued that the web is making us stupid:

Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

Nicholas Carr sounded a similar note in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine. Warning that the Web was changing the way he — and others — think, he suggested that the effects of Internet reading extended beyond the falling test scores of adolescence. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote, confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books.

What we seem to be doing is creating a context -- the Web -- where we are stressing different cognitive capabilities in the brains of our young people, and the outcomes will be different. We are moving away from sustained, linear, focused concentration as our principal mode of reasoning.

Note the implicit and unstated message: reasoning should principally be a solitary pursuit, not a social one. Among other aspects of the shift in cognition, the primary one -- not really explored in the Times article at all -- is toward a social, shared, and interactive mode of reasoning.

In the case of kids studying today, not only are they online researching instead of reading a book in a library carrell, they are also instant messaging and facebooking with their schoolmates the entire time. The elephant in the room is the movement from solitary studying to a collective, hivemindish mode of learning, where kids are shifting for questioning to answering, from learning to teaching all the time.

This is totally ignored here because it doesn't match the testing discipline -- where individual kids are tested on linear, focused, and sustained reading -- and the underlying premises of our educational system, which is to produce good little individual economic cogs. Meanwhile, the kids are turning themselves into self-organized networks where collective productivity is the central aim. But instead of trying to examine why kids gravitate to this new mode of operation, all the experts worry that the kids' pineal glands will dry up:

Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. Scientists speculate that reading on the Internet may also affect the brain’s hard wiring in a way that is different from book reading.

“The question is, does it change your brain in some beneficial way?” said Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University. “The brain is malleable and adapts to its environment. Whatever the pressures are on us to succeed, our brain will try and deal with it.”

Some scientists worry that the fractured experience typical of the Internet could rob developing readers of crucial skills. “Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” said Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.

This is a revolution, so the powers that be will resist it. They will say what we are doing is illegitimate, that we are losing more than we have gained, that we won't fit in, that we are losing critical skills essential to our careers. What we have gained they will deride: they'll say we are the lesser offspring of greater forebears, moving far too fast from a golden age into a debased and irrational future.

Yes, and if the environment is changing -- we live in a world where the web will likely be the primary medium of work, play, and learning in the future -- shouldn't we change? If it is inducing new ways to think, shouldn't we examine what they are instead of just grumping about leaving behind the old? Now that we drive cars, we have to learn new skills, decidedly different from riding horses: isn't that reasonable?

Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. Scientists speculate that reading on the Internet may also affect the brain’s hard wiring in a way that is different from book reading.

Clearly, learning how to use the web effectively is a critical skill, and one that is likely to be much more useful than a deep understanding of the Dewey Decimal System, just like typing is more useful skill these days that Gregg shorthand.

There is some interest in actively training students to use the web effectively, but as indicated by the article, educators are missing the social element of the social revolution, and persist in wanting to measure individual performance in research-type tasks. Meanwhile, the kids are reshaping their cognition to include non-linear, shared, and interruptive modes of thinking, exactly the kind of reasoning about the world that Carr and other will consider stupidity.

The web will reorder our core perceptions, of time, of purpose, of authority and relevance. We move into a realm where our identity is linked to our network of contacts and our shared activities: we are increasingly defined though our relationships with others, instead of our membership in organizations, like schools, clubs, or citizenship.

This is a revolution, so the powers that be will resist it. They will say what we are doing is illegitimate, that we are losing more than we have gained, that we won't fit in, that we are losing critical skills essential to our careers. What we have gained they will deride: they'll say we are the lesser offspring of greater forebears, moving far too fast from a golden age into a debased and irrational future.

But they don't really even talk about what we have learned, what we now value, where we think we are headed. They are afraid, so they spread fear.

Virginia Postrel characterized those that resist the upside of progress and who argue that we are falling into a darker time as the enemies of the future, and no where are the battle lines more clear than the debate about children and the Web. At the superficial level, this is akin to the 20th Century griping when educators finally stopped forcing children to learn Latin and ancient Greek, when classicists were sure that Western civilization would collapse.

Personally, I am happy that kids are watching less TV, which Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone characterized as a pernicious disease dissolving society's connective tissue.

The larger issues -- particularly the subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in human cognition from constant exposure to the web, and the rise of web-based sociality -- will need a much broader examination than offered by the Times in this piece, although I admit that it is wider-scoped than many others I have read in recent years.