You Are Terrible At Reading Things Online
Katherine Mangu-Ward | September 19, 2008, 12:13pm
Mark Bauerlein, scourge of Internet users and people born after 1965, recently wrote a book called The Dumbest Generation. Since then, he's been on a one-man jihad against Kids These Days and Their Cellular Phones and Computers.
This week, in The Chronicle of Higher Education he declares that "Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind." When people read things online, according to a newish study, their eyes move in a "F" shape, reading all the way across at the top of the page, but moving pretty much vertically down the left margin by the time they get to the bottom.
This technique is none-too-effective for understanding "a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention." Fair enough. But the online reading mode Bauerlein describes has students "race[ing] across the surface, dicing language and ideas into bullets and graphics, seeking what they already want," which doesn't sounds like the end of civilization to me. It sounds like a complementary skill to settling in with a dense text. He writes:
"Last year when I required students in a literature survey course to obtain obituaries of famous writers without using the Internet, they stared in confusion. Checking a reference book, asking a librarian, and finding a microfiche didn't occur to them. So many free deliveries through the screen had sapped that initiative."
That's akin to saying, "I asked students to make toast without a toaster, but building a fire and finding a long stick to hold the bread didn't occur to them. The toaster had sapped their initiative."
I think Bauerlein makes a moderate case at the end of the article for carving out a space in educational environments for careful reading on dead tree, but I'm not sure, because by the end of his article, I was
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For more, see Nick Gillespie go head to head with Bauerlein at reason.tv.
SugarFree | September 19, 2008, 12:46pm | #
"Of Modern Poetry"
Wallace Stevens
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.
See! You morons probably don't even know those are words!
Famous Mortimer | September 19, 2008, 7:40pm | #
What an ass. The Internet has been such an important, and far reaching tool for information hounds that I think it's safe to say that most people actually take it for granted.
The ability to cross reference conveniently, and engage in do-it-yourself interests is exactly how people should learn. After all, intelligence is not just about gleaning words from a page, but actually applying those thoughts, and ideas toward a deeper understanding.
Also, the ability to read debates, and discussions is another important result of Internet technology that is once again, often taken for granted.
Only hearing a professor's argument, or the arguments of your brain-dead classmates can make traditional education seem painstakingly slow, and unrewarding.
In the end, real education is about personal initiative. If you want to increase your knowledge on any topic, there really aren't any excuses left. You can't blame it on your school system, or your Marxist professor. You can go online and explore an almost endless resource of contrary opinions.
School, alone, clearly hasn't been able to instill those qualities in even a majority of the people who enter into its scheme.
I believe that an educational institution can be as meaningful as one makes it, but ultimately, what you learn, and how you learn is going to be up to you.
Thanks to the Internet, from a written standpoint, there is little stopping you.
People like the author are merely trying to keep their seat at the table, and preserve what they apparently think is their intellectual authority.
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