“It’s important to explicitly acknowledge the downsides of any technological transformation - to “think of the underside first,” in a precautionary way.”
-Bruce Sterling, in Shaping Things

Bruce Shauble’s post, A Book in the Hand, raises an interesting question about reading. Bruce is wondering whether kids are missing the chance to read deeply because so much of their reading and entertainment is electronically mediated.

…they’re essentially non-readers. Or, more accurately, they’re merely functional readers. They may be, and and in most cases probably are, technologically adept. They’re good at text messaging and instant messaging and Googling and playing video games. They know how to access information. They graze, grab what they need to get an assignment done, and then move on. But their mental lives, as far as I can see, are about a mile wide and about an inch deep.

I’m grateful for Bruce’s post, because it prompted me to look at this issue for myself. Like Bruce, I believe that my reading habits have changed in the last few years, and that my purposes for reading seem to have become more centered on my interest in blogging. I don’t know if this means anything - good or bad - in the grand scale of things. I’m reading a novel now, and though I don’t make as much headway with it as I would have pre-internet, I still read a variety of books.

The influence that computers have had on reading is an important question for teachers to think about. Are people reading more superficially? I don’t know. But the temptation to condemn technology should be resisted. The web is a great resource, and it needn’t be viewed in a deterministic way.

Differentiating between literary and informational reading was a subject that Louise Rosenblatt addressed with her theory of transactional reading. Rather than seeing texts as being either informational or literary expressions, she developed a model of reading that constructs reader stance as a variable that exists on a continuum between what she called efferent and aesthetic reading. In an interview that nicely summarizes her thinking, she had some advice for teachers that is worth passing along:

…the same text can be read either way. I can read Shakespeare efferently, I can tell you how many images of pain there are in King Lear or something like that. But if I really want to experience King Lear as a tragedy, I have to be reading it very differently. Not categorizing or labeling. It’s often very valuable to know afterwards, to do it afterwards, after you’ve had the experience. So I would say about teaching: whenever you are having students read something, have them be clear about their purpose.

I believe that superficiality is a danger of information overload, but with technologically mediated texts, we should remember that we can exercise choice in what we read, and how we read. It’s a question of stance, not substance, and we can learn to deliberately read from a variety of them.