The art of reading

Nicholas Carr thinks we might be in trouble. In an article published in the latest issue of the The Atlantic, provocatively titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", Carr describes how his decade-plus of internet use has changed the way he reads and thinks. He laments the fact that he no longer has the attention span to read lengthy articles and books. He blames this loss on using the internet for a certain kind of reading: skimming. Carr suggests that although we're might be reading more than we did in the 1970's or 1980's, the kind of reading we're doing is skimming. Ultimately, Carr shares his fears that this trend has negative consequences for us culturally, making us, intellectually, less complex.

Carr's article is not the only one on this subject to appear recently. Michael Agger wrote about the skimming phenomenon in June. In "How We Read Online," Agger sums up the research about online skimming. According to Jakob Nielsen, whom Agger quotes several times, our online reading habits aren't pretty: "[U]sers are selfish, lazy, and ruthless." Agger's key distinction in the piece is between reading for information and reading for pleasure. Pleasure readers can still read online, although it's not the best environment. And screens will never replace paper. In fact, paper is a new salve for the travails of the glowing screen: "Rather, paper seems to be the new Prozac. A balm for the distracted mind."

Complaining about or observing the differences between reading online and reading say, a book, isn't a new phenomenon. James W. Earl, a professor of English at the University of Oregon, wrote about the problems of online reading in an article that appeared in the April 14, 2000 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education ("Reading for Sheer Pleasure--Remember That?"). Earl's issue with technology wasn't so much how it changed reading as much as the act of being online took people away from reading: "there's an information highway running right through the green campus, with an on-ramp on every desk where people used to sit and read." Earl's distinction is between that idea of going online and reading, a distinction that is much less meaningful today when so many things are available to read online. How things have changed since Earl's article in 2000 was brought home to me yesterday when I met with someone who holds a master's degree in French Literature. He had a print copy of the New York Times. "I always read it in print," he responded when I confessed to reading the online version. Looking at his print copy, with its rows of columns and small print, was, I admit, intimidating. Perhaps I've become a lazy reader using the Times' website. Looking at the "Most Emailed" list is always a quick way to navigate through the site. Yet, on the weekends, one of my favorite things to do is to read the local newspaper thoroughly at breakfast. And I don't have any fancy navigational aids then, unless you count the brief index that's smooshed on the bottom of the first page. Like perhaps many people, I find myself reading in both worlds: in print and online.

The arguments of Carr, Agger, and Earl are all based on assumptions about how we read in different situations. For Carr, online skimming destroys one's ability to read attentively and in-depth. Agger admits the necessity for skimming online; yet his assumption is that pleasure reading will be a panacea to the skimming necessary when we read online. Earl's assumption, made in 2000, is that online activities are antithetical to the reading process. The debate about online versus print reading, skimming versus reading in depth, is something of a false dichotomy. We have a variety of reasons to read and ways to read both in print and online. I may read an Op-Ed piece online in the New York Times and then book a flight; chances are, I'm probably not doing those things simultaneously if I'm interested in what I'm reading. But a variety of other circumstances influence if I multitask when reading or step away. The piece may not be well-written. It might be well-written, but I may have read enough to understand the argument without reading all the way through. This isn't limited to the online world of text. I've had this problem with Jared Diamond's books. I've read most of both Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse. Diamond's thesis and insights are so clear that by the time I'm three-quarters of the way through, I feel that I've grasped his arguments and insights completely. (Sorry, Jared)

There's also the time/place issue. A colleague asked if I'd read a lengthy online article. I had. "I started to," she said. Then she shrugged, "But I was at work, so. . ." We all know that work is one of the primary reasons we don't get to read enough. My husband has a rule: no novels at breakfast. The reason? They're potentially too absorbing to put down for him to leave in time for work. The same can be true for online materials. My husband, the no-novels-at-breakfast-guy can also spend hours reading various blogs.

Also, we shouldn't necessarily lump reading for pleasure and reading to be informed or to understand an argument together. I don't necessarily feel the same thrill reading Thomas Freidman as I do a good novel. However, we shouldn't push too hard on the distinction either, as Agger does. Reading a novel in print is not necessarily the antidote for our online overindulgences. For both reading for pleasure and reading for information some of the same issues which can distract us or limit our reading to a quick skim which I discussed above apply. Let's face it: reading takes time, patience, and a willingness to engage with the printed word be it online or on the page. Some people just don't like to read, as the plethora of summer book reading programs in public libraries with slogans like "Catch the Reading Bug" (Eugene OR Public Library), attest. Sometimes we just don't have a lot of time or inclination to read. How many times have you put a book down because you "just couldn't get into it" or didn't have the time to read it as carefully as you would like? The internet perhaps facilitates this notion of not finishing what we start by making it so easy to leave our materials behind. There's no pile of books or magazines on our nightstands to make us feel guilty. I'm not convinced internet skimming is shrinking our attention spans or radically changing how we read. Texting is doing that, but that's a subject for another blog post.


So welcome, fair readers, to the launch of this blog. As this post's title suggests, this blog will be a meditation on reading of all sorts. Expect to see some book reviews and also some essay-like thoughts. I've spent the past nine years training to be a professional reader (read: scholar) and reading has been a lifelong love. Although my career has taken a different direction, I look forward to sharing ideas with other readers. You might see some scholarly tendencies, but nothing like this, I promise.

Thanks for reading. Did you skim, or read? Let me know!