The great reading debate continues

I'm spending some time in a cafe, drinking tea. There's a little girl waiting for her parents to fetch her her juice and bagel. While she waits, she's reading the paper. Or maybe just looking at the pictures and ads. Whatever she's doing, she's doing it with total concentration, poring over the page gripped in both hands. According to the New York Times, this child's act may be revolutionary precisely because she's reading a printed page.

It's interesting to see this issue of internet reading come up again. The Times just published the first article in a series on digital versus print reading. It's quite lengthy at four online "pages." And just in case you weren't aware of the high stakes here, the series title gives you a clue: "The Future of Reading." Currently, it's the second most emailed story on the Times site. The article offers some sobering statistics from a report issued by the National Endowment of the Arts, using Department of Education data. The findings cited by the Times article include:

just over a fifth of 17-year-olds said they read almost every day for fun in 2004, down from nearly a third in 1984.

Nineteen percent of 17-year-olds said they never or hardly ever read for fun in 2004, up from 9 percent in 1984. (It was unclear whether they thought of what they did on the Internet as “reading.”)

The Times author, Motoko Rich, at least points out that we read for a variety of reasons (although calling reading a mortgage contract the sort of minimal, informational level of reading is a bit of stretch). Where people seem most passionate about the issue is the idea of reading for learning, enrichment, or pleasure. Rich quotes David McCullough: "Learning is not to be found on a printout [. . .] It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”

Take that, Perez Hilton readers! But a sticky question,which I think we ultimately will shy away from answering, at the heart of this debate is: can online reading make us better people, in the same way, that reading a "great book" can?

Whether or not the internet can make us "better" (read better educated, more literate, more sophiticated) is a question that's thornt to answer. This is why the dichotomy of online reading for information versus print reading for pleasure is preferable to contemplate. But this dichotomy is a problem if we don't confront its underlying assumptions. Take Ann Althouse's response to Rich's article. The title of Althouse's response is "Does reading on the internet count as reading." Althouse's answer is yes. But at the end of her article, she reaffirms this central dichotomy:

I definitely think that reading on-line restructures your brain. That may be bad in some ways, but it's got to be good in others. In any case, it's where I am now. I still read books, but I read them differently, for example, I cut to the essence quickly and spring into alert when I detect bullshit. I'm offended by padding, pedantry, and humorlessness. This may cut off some paths to enlightenment for me, but it also saves me a lot of time, and I find some other path.

Althouse's assertion is dependent on the assumption that we're all reading for information, for research, for argument. It might work for a book with an argument that's established over the course of several chapters. But how does this style of reading work with a novel, a memoir, a biography?

The Times article also focuses on the internet's research potential, citing the internet's potential to help students with disabilities, such as dyslexia, read. Once again, the example cited was how the internet helped one such student do research. Well, the internet has made research easier--if you've developed the skills, of course. Understanding how a web page is organized, where the information you want is located (is it in "about us?" for example), what websites among the millions turned up by a Google search are going to be the most helpful takes time and practice. I don't think they're developed just because someone does a lot of online reading. This is true for print research as well. As an undergraduate and master's student, when I photocopied an article from a journal, I never bothered to photocopy the notes. Why should I? It was the article I was interested in. It took writing a master's thesis before I understood that the article was only one part of a larger picture, and that I might want to look at those other things quoted and cited by the author whose article I was reading.

Until we accept that reading, whether done for research or pleasure, in print or online, is part of a complex way in which we take in and evaluate information, entertain ourselves, create and pass on our stories and our histories, this debate isn't going to go very far.