Online Reading: Better than the Book?

Does the growing preference for reading from a screen rather than paper threaten our nation's intellectual health? That's the question discussed in a thought-provoking article by Motoko Rich in today's New York Times (link below). After considering the questions the piece raises about the effects of online reading, particularly on young people, I wondered what it meant that I, a Boomer addicted to the feel of a book in my hands and uninterrupted time to lose myself in it, had read it not in the paper but online?

As a teacher and librarian who watched the changes technology brought to the reading practices of high school students, I have both welcomed and worried about the monumental shift in the ways kids seek knowledge and entertainment. I reveled in the new, often free accessibility of more knowledge than any library full of books could provide, even while I extolled the primacy of books, believing that reading online encourages quantity over quality, superficiality over depth, immediacy over truth with all its time-sapping subtleties. I may have spoken with enthusiasm when I taught kids how to use library databases, but it was only when I gave book talks that passion, even a sense of the sacred, gave music to my voice. The superiority of the printed page, I thought, would always win out.

Now I'm not so sure. Whether I like it or not, the days of the printed page are numbered. But I'm not as saddened or alarmed by that as I once was. Does onscreen reading have its dangers? Yes. Will much be lost as paper books become mere antiques? Yes, just as much was lost when horses were replaced by cars and torches by electric lights. But whatever the consequences, this ship has sailed, and nothing short of an apocolypse will abort the journey we're on. Future generations will, I'm convinced, look back at the age of the personal computer as the start of a whole new epoch of human progress, with ramifications as significant as the changes in the beak of the finch.

And so even while I'm hoarding my books, I'll be hoping that educators can do a better job of acknowledging and maximizing the techno-human evolution we're in than the test-makers in Mokoto's article who continue to assess only one form of acquiring knowledge while students are happily multi-tasking, or the educator who sees no need to teach online reading because “Nobody has taught a single kid to text message....When they want to do something, schools don’t have to get involved.” Would this English teacher exempt from her class any student who can already read and chooses to do so? If this attitude prevails, and kids aren't taught the critical skills they need to find the truth in the blitz of half-facts zooming past their eyes, then the dangers of online reading may indeed outweigh the benefits.

I started this essay by asking what it meant that I, a lifelong practitioner and teacher of reading in its traditional medium, read the article in its online form? I guess it means that I've gone over to the Dark Side, and found it not so dark after all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?ref=books

Another good piece is Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google. "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."