Thread by @kegill

Digital ink, fleeting soundbites, and impatience for depth > collateral societal damage. Our brains are adapting without thought of consequence.

More than 6,000 years ago, our brains created a new circuit which enabled literacy. It’s not genetic but environmental. #Thread

https://twitter.com/maryannewolf_/status/1034303799781814273

“Thinking, Fast and Slow” documents the challenge of moving from emotional (fast) to thoughtful (slow) reactions when communication was slower and paper-based. Now, with frictionless likes/shares and bite-sized windows into text on phones...
kahneman.socialpsychology.org

Researchers like @MaryanneWolf_ point out that “slower, time-demanding deep reading processes” help the brain (us!) think critically, form empathy, develop logic (reasoning). Yet our smartphone/Kindle/iPad culture discourages those practices.

“Multiple studies show that digital screen use may be causing a variety of troubling downstream effects on reading comprehension in older high school and college students....

“Students who read on print were superior in their comprehension to screen-reading peers, particularly in their ability to sequence detail and reconstruct the plot in chronological order.”

READ THIS AGAIN.

“Katzir’s research has found that the negative effects of screen reading can appear as early as fourth and fifth grade - with implications not only for comprehension, but also on the growth of empathy.”

READ THIS AGAIN

Another group of researchers “emphasize that the sense of touch in print reading adds an important redundancy to information – a kind of ‘geometry’ to words, and a spatial ‘thereness’ for text.”

All of this is important for the long-term future of the species.

I’m particularly concerned about its affect on “the deliberately confusing public referendum questions citizens encounter in the voting booth” as well as the propaganda that accompanies them.

Frankly, it’s scary as hell to think about the impact on our ability as a society to spot propaganda.

We are already seeing this play out in climate science and Trump’s tweets (he has made 12,019 false or misleading claims over 928 days, @washingtonpost).

I’ve made it a mission to encourage people not to share tweets/posts/memes/pix/vids that have no provenance.

Little did I know that the MEDIUM might be working against me, not just emotional hijacking.

But it’s not just the short-form knee-jerk share that’s a challenge.

“if you are reading something lengthy – more than 500 words or more than a page of the book or screen – your comprehension will likely take a hit if you’re using a digital device”
hechingerreport.org/textbook-dilem…

From 2017, researchers discovered:
“Students said they preferred and performed better when reading on screens. But their actual performance tended to suffer.”

And they’re looking at easily measurable factors (not squishy like empathy)

theconversation.com/the-enduring-p…

We can’t change what we don’t measure - and apparently not many researchers have been comparing digital text comprehension to paper. This is from 2013

scientificamerican.com/article/readin…

I used to tell students about a very old study - when monitors were clunky and green-on-black - that made similar points. But I thought that was partly a function of legibility, the crappy type (equivalent to dot matrix printing). Even then I lamented the lack of research.

Once we reach a level of fluency, we “skim” on paper rather than read word-for-word because we recognize word shape.

Digital texts invoke a different form of skimming: its not unlike the eye pattern scan for keywords on a page or a watchman scanning for movement.

I teach my design students to start with paper and pen/pencil - to free themselves from the constraints of software in order to nurture imagination. To write in order to tap on a different part of the brain.

But I’d not thought of the converse, of reading.

It’s imperative that we think about the implications (aka externalities, unintended consequences) of disruption. How do we proactively shape brains that are fluent in print and digital, that don’t sacrifice critical assessment on the altar of impaired attention?

Over the years, I’ve let myself be seduced into carrying a library around in my hand. I was a late comer (relatively speaking) to the Kindle and still relish my paper books. If I truly need to THINK about what I’m reading, I turn to paper. But my brain is pre-digital.

Shout out to @Asimovs_SF and @jaspkelly this month On the Net for the introduction to @MaryanneWolf_ and issues around #deepReading

asimovs.com/current-issue/…

(It would be a public service to archive this column for all to read, @SheilaWilliam10)

Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
@MaryanneWolf_
amazon.com/Reader-Come-Ho…

@WriterWay @LindaLowen @brannonj @ljthornton

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