![]() According to Wolf, we are losing what she calls "deep literacy" or "deep reading." This does not include decoding written symbols, writing one's name, or making lists. In her 2018 book, Reader, Come Home, Wolf uses cognitive neuroscience and developmental psycholinguistics to study the reading brain and literacy development, and in doing so, helps identify what is being lost. A decade later, Carr's discomfort is shared by growing legions of frustrated, formerly serious readers. That must be the case, because if there is any law of neurophysiology, it is that the brain wires itself continuously in accordance with its every experience. Something neurophysiological is happening to us, he argued, and we don't know what it is. Nicholas Carr's 2010 book, The Shallows, begins with the author's irritation at his own truncated attention span for reading. Taken together, these technologies may also be creating novel neural pathways, especially in developing young brains, that promise greater if different kinds of cognitive capacities, albeit capacities we cannot predict or even imagine with confidence.īut it is also clear that something else has been lost. In some respects, new digital technologies are decreasing social isolation, even if in other respects they may be increasing it. It may also be diffusing culture music and film of all kinds are cheaply and easily available to almost everyone. As with any tangle between technology and culture, empirical evidence is elusive, but two things, at least, are clear.įor one, the new digital technology is democratizing written language and variously expanding the range of people who use and learn from it. Such disturbances today are manifold, and, as before, their most critical aspects may reside in alterations to both the scope and nature of literacy. Harold Innis noted in 1948, as television was on the cusp of revolutionizing American life, that "sudden extensions of communication are reflected in cultural disturbances," and it's clear we are stumbling through another such episode. We are noticing more in part because, as Maryanne Wolf has pointed out, this technology is changing what, how, and why we read, and in turn what, how, and why we write and even think. ![]() Thoughtful Americans are realizing that the pervasive IT-revolution devices upon which we are increasingly dependent are affecting our society and culture in significant but as yet uncertain ways.
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