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A review by bupdaddy
Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf
3.0
While the subject matter Wolf writes about is incredibly important - her thesis is that reading from dead-tree books is a different experience from reading on screens (besides surfing the net and our smartphones, she also cited one study that showed a decline in comprehension for the same text 'twixt a paper version and an eReader version), and that we're all becoming less insightful, less critical, less immersed readers and it's a crisis - I felt kind of underwhelmed.
I mean, I think the sense that we're all getting shorter attention spans, and that reading a book is getting a tougher hurdle for many of us, is a common, intuitive one. It's probably true, and is important to look at.
But she kept saying she was going to really nail that argument, then - maybe I missed it - she switched to saying she had. And like I said, it was one study.
The book cites lots and lots and lots of studies, but only one that I caught that was making the case that we absorb less from screen reading than traditional reading.
Add to that that her writing style was...challenging. I had to force myself to finish. And I know this is my problem, not hers, but it's written as a series of letters (that is, correspondences, not characters from our alphabet, because, you know, I'm fine with books written in alphabets), which just bugged me. And she made the plural of schema schemas, which is fine - I've seen it pluralized as schema, schemas and schemata in different places - but then she made the plural of sequel sequelae. I can't even.
Her payoff, that because screens are here to stay, students should be taught two reading styles from early on, so that they can fairly effortlessly switch to what she termed 'deep reading' (the dead tree stuff) when needed and can also build up good attention spans, is provocative and probably a good idea. Again, for my money, the whole 'we can't pay attention anymore because of the interwebs and the twitter and those damn kids with their pintagram accounts' feels right, but I think it's worth proving that in more than one small study (which may have been done). I'll also acknowledge that she calls her proposal for the fix a hypothesis, which would need to be monitored to test it out.
But I'd like to see better proof it's broken.
I mean, I think the sense that we're all getting shorter attention spans, and that reading a book is getting a tougher hurdle for many of us, is a common, intuitive one. It's probably true, and is important to look at.
But she kept saying she was going to really nail that argument, then - maybe I missed it - she switched to saying she had. And like I said, it was one study.
The book cites lots and lots and lots of studies, but only one that I caught that was making the case that we absorb less from screen reading than traditional reading.
Add to that that her writing style was...challenging. I had to force myself to finish. And I know this is my problem, not hers, but it's written as a series of letters (that is, correspondences, not characters from our alphabet, because, you know, I'm fine with books written in alphabets), which just bugged me. And she made the plural of schema schemas, which is fine - I've seen it pluralized as schema, schemas and schemata in different places - but then she made the plural of sequel sequelae. I can't even.
Her payoff, that because screens are here to stay, students should be taught two reading styles from early on, so that they can fairly effortlessly switch to what she termed 'deep reading' (the dead tree stuff) when needed and can also build up good attention spans, is provocative and probably a good idea. Again, for my money, the whole 'we can't pay attention anymore because of the interwebs and the twitter and those damn kids with their pintagram accounts' feels right, but I think it's worth proving that in more than one small study (which may have been done). I'll also acknowledge that she calls her proposal for the fix a hypothesis, which would need to be monitored to test it out.
But I'd like to see better proof it's broken.