Quotes & Excerpts

Learning by reading was also a more solitary and cerebral experience compared with oral culture. Reading is meant to be done in privacy. Although oral communication is fleeting, print is permanent, allowing us to hold on to the words and thoughts, storing them and returning to them to reference. In oral cultures, communication must be stored in one’s memory, offering only limited ability to recall. That’s why oral cultures relied on mnemonics and rhyme to store their memories.

Print exercised the mind in other novel ways, particularly in nurturing reflection. A reader could reflect on or even turn back the pages to revisit information, opening up the human imagination to wholly new ways of thinking.

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Books capture and sequester time itself. A book has an aura of permanence attached to it. Even today, in the electronic age, most people would be appalled at the act of tearing up a book or throwing it in the garbage. Time is frozen in space inside the pages of a book, just as a photograph would become frozen in time in the 19th century. The change in consciousness brought on by the printed word would come to condition the way scientists and economists freeze time and claim space in their respective disciplines. (< Ch. 4, Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth, 2022)

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Dr. Patricia Greenfield....published an extensive report on the effects that the use of computers, the internet, multitasking, and video games were having on personal agency in the journal Science in 2009. She analyzed fifty different studies on the interface of learning and the new digital communication technologies. She reported that while visual skills had improved, there was a commensurate decline in reading texts, and especially literary reading, which has possibly contributed to a decline in critical thinking.60

Greenfield noted that “by using more visual media, students will process information better,” but was quick to add that most visual media are real-time media that do not allow for reflection, analysis, or imagination so important to critical thinking.61

The efficiency gained in quicker access to more simplified visually represented media with diminished text is at the expense of a deeper learning experience. Greenfield took particular aim at multitasking, suggesting that “if you are trying to solve a complex problem, you need sustained concentration … if you are doing a task that requires deep sustained thought, multitasking is detrimental.”62

60. Patricia Greenfield et al., "Technology and Informal Education: What Is Taught, What Is Learned," Science 323, no. 69 (2009).

61. Stuart Wolpert, "Is Technology Producing a Decline in Critical Thinking and Analysis?" UCLA Newsroom, January 27, 2009, https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/is-technology-producing-a-decline-79127.

62. Ibid.

(< Ch. 5, Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth, 2022

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“In the first quarter of our century,” writes Maryanne Wolf, “we daily conflate information with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom — with the resulting diminution of all three.” The solution? Deep reading. In her new book, “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World,” the scholar and author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain” (2000) argues, sensibly, that our lives could benefit from more contemplation. Wolf ’s research into changes in the reading brain — brought on by digital culture — also led her to a conclusion she hadn’t anticipated: “If we gradually lose the ability to examine how we think, we will also lose the ability to examine dispassionately how those who would govern us think.” Think on that, dear reader. -- Weekend Booking, John McMurtrie, San Francisco Chronicle

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