Accidental Blogger

My reading skills are declining. For instance, I’m not sure what this recent, “most popular” NYT article is about. At first it appears to pit reading books against reading online digital text, as if one were compelled to choose exclusively between the two, or as if the two behaviors were distinct approaches to a single clear result, such as “get[ting] into college.” But then it transitions (a real verb, courtesy of U.S. aeronautics jargon, c. 1975, so I’ve learned from the online version of the OED) to a more nuanced discussion of the heuristic or therapeutic value of reading on the Web, particularly for folks who have trouble reading traditional hard copy texts or who suffer other educational disadvantages. In the interim, sundry experts worry over whether formal testing is appropriate for online reading, texting, and time wasting. There is no conclusion. Perhaps my problem with this article begins with the fact that I “read” it online.

As far as I can tell, the “passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age” is misguided. First we need a passionate debate about just what it means to read, if by “passionate” we mean a debate carried out in the pages of the Times, since the debate about what reading “means” is perennial, but also not popularly appealing.

I hope, in any case, that Prof. Spiro takes care if he participates in either debate. Like the allegorists of yore, he finds in online reading an accurate map of the world. Online reading bests traditional reading, he proclaims, “because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.” I want to respond, “Yes, the world does go in a line, and it is organized into compartments,” or, “Nor does the world require rebooting or automated upgrades to Flash, Java, and Adobe.” Or one could respond, “The fact that the world doesn’t go in a line is precisely why one might care to read a text that does.” (Anyway, I’m confused, because the only text of which I’m aware that goes in a straight line is the one resulting from a copy-and-paste to Notepad with word-wrap turned off.)

I do sympathize with those who are attracted to online text and image consumption, particularly when Dana Gioia and David McCullough lull me to distraction with their advocacy for “the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading” of “great books.” Just shut up, you two, and get with it. Great books are held mostly by libraries, and library catalogs are most readily accessible online. Resolve that conundrum for us first, please, before you suffer us to endure another list of great works, of which we now have an epidemic, thanks to the Web.

Eighteen-year-old Zachary, I’m afraid, is no more authoritative. The Web may very well be “about a conversation,” but even a dusty old great book like The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is no less multi-directional, and it’s about conversation, too.

If we’re really interested in identifying factors that affect “how we read”—whatever that means—I can offer a concrete example of more palpable effect that has nothing to do with technology, which hardly changes how we read at all, really. I’m thinking of parenting, which effects a true revolution in reading. Before my son was born, I read slowly but often, plodding through all sorts of books, great and small. Now, after two years and a few months of being a dad, I reflect that I’m lucky to traverse with divided attention three pages of a book at a time, and when my son Sebastian visits me at work, reading online is impossible. He is no more interested in online content than Messrs. Gioia and McCullough, though. He just likes pounding the crap out of the keyboard.