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--></style><title>Fwd: Caleb Crain's NYer
article</title></head><body>
<div>This from Andrew Winer, and I agree that it's an important
argument. If you'd prefer the link, here it is:</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><font
size="+1"
>http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_<span
></span>atlarge_crain</font></div>
<div><br></div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>From: "Andrew Winer"
<andrew.winer@ucr.edu><br>
To: "Charles Whitney" <Chuck.Whitney@ucr.edu><br>
Subject: Caleb Crain's NYer article<br>
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2007 16:48:53 -0800<br>
X-Junkmail-Whitelist: YES (by domain whitelist at
sentrell.ucr.edu)<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1">Hi
Chuck,</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1">Not sure if
you've seen this yet, but I think that every professor of writing
should read this current New Yorker piece, and that it should be
assigned to incoming freshmen, across the board. Contemporary
students deserve to understand what their brains are doing when they
read versus when they are "plugged in" (to video games, You
Tube, TV, etc.), and why their chances of making a larger contribution
to the world, not to mention lucid decisions, vastly
decrease in proportion to their decreased reading time (which
turns out to be reflecting/contemplating/down- time for the brain).
The essay also crucially debunks journalist Steven Johnson's recent
claim that television and video games are making our minds
sharper.</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial"
size="-1">-Andrew</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font size="+3"><b>Twilight of the
Books</b></font><br>
<font size="+3"><b></b></font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font size="+2"><b>What will life be like
if people stop reading?</b></font><br>
<font size="+2"><b></b></font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><b>by</b> <a
href=
"http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?query=authorName:%22Caleb Crain%22"
><b>Caleb Crain</b></a><b> December 24, 2007</b><br>
<b></b>
<blockquote> <br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><img
src="cid:a06240805c3a186681d12@[138.23.96.51].1.0"
alt="071224_r16862_p233.jpg"></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>A recent study has shown a steep decline
in literary reading among schoolchildren.<br>
<blockquote> <br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American
adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book.
In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began
asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that
fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six
months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the
General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans
had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding
twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents
to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not
excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you
didn't read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the
rise.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>You wouldn't think so, however, if you
consulted the Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts,
who, since 1982, have asked thousands of Americans questions about
reading that are not only detailed but consistent. The results, first
reported by the N.E.A. in 2004, are dispiriting. In 1982, 56.9 per
cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the
previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in
1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a
follow-up report, "To Read or Not to Read," which showed
correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as
diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his
introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, "Poor reading
skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and
fewer opportunities for advancement."<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>This decline is not news to those who
depend on print for a living. In 1970, according to<i> Editor &
Publisher International Year Book</i>, there were 62.1 million weekday
newspapers in circulation-about 0.3 papers per person. Since 1990,
circulation has declined steadily, and in 2006 there were just 52.3
million weekday papers-about 0.17 per person. In January 1994,
forty-nine per cent of respondents told the Pew Research Center for
the People and the Press that they had read a newspaper the day
before. In 2006, only forty-three per cent said so, including those
who read online. Book sales, meanwhile, have stagnated. The Book
Industry Study Group estimates that sales fell from 8.27 books per
person in 2001 to 7.93 in 2006. According to the Department of Labor,
American households spent an average of a hundred and sixty-three
dollars on reading in 1995 and a hundred and twenty-six dollars in
2005. In "To Read or Not to Read," the N.E.A. reports that
American households' spending on books, adjusted for inflation, is
"near its twenty-year low," even as the average price of a new book
has increased.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>More alarming are indications that
Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability.
According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the
average adult's skill in reading prose slipped one point on a
five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were
proficient-capable of such tasks as "comparing viewpoints in two
editorials"-declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen. The
Department of Education found that reading skills have improved
moderately among fourth and eighth graders in the past decade and a
half, with the largest jump occurring just before the No Child Left
Behind Act took effect, but twelfth graders seem to be taking after
their elders. Their reading scores fell an average of six points
between 1992 and 2005, and the share of proficient twelfth-grade
readers dropped from forty per cent to thirty-five per cent. The
steepest declines were in "reading for literary experience"-the
kind that involves "exploring themes, events, characters, settings,
and the language of literary works," in the words of the
department's test-makers. In 1992, fifty-four per cent of twelfth
graders told the Department of Education that they talked about their
reading with friends at least once a week. By 2005, only thirty-seven
per cent said they did.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>The erosion isn't unique to America.
Some of the best data come from the Netherlands, where in 1955
researchers began to ask people to keep diaries of how they spent
every fifteen minutes of their leisure time. Time-budget diaries yield
richer data than surveys, and people are thought to be less likely to
lie about their accomplishments if they have to do it four times an
hour. Between 1955 and 1975, the decades when television was being
introduced into the Netherlands, reading on weekday evenings and
weekends fell from five hours a week to 3.6, while television watching
rose from about ten minutes a week to more than ten hours. During the
next two decades, reading continued to fall and television watching to
rise, though more slowly. By 1995, reading, which had occupied
twenty-one per cent of people's spare time in 1955, accounted for
just nine per cent.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>The most striking results were
generational. In general, older Dutch people read more. It would be
natural to infer from this that each generation reads more as it ages,
and, indeed, the researchers found something like this to be the case
for earlier generations. But, with later ones, the age-related growth
in reading dwindled. The turning point seems to have come with the
generation born in the nineteen-forties. By 1995, a Dutch college
graduate born after 1969 was likely to spend fewer hours reading each
week than a little-educated person born before 1950. As far as reading
habits were concerned, academic credentials mattered less than whether
a person had been raised in the era of television. The N.E.A., in its
twenty years of data, has found a similar pattern. Between 1982 and
2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined not
only in every age group but in every generation-even in those moving
from youth into middle age, which is often considered the most fertile
time of life for reading. We are reading less as we age, and we are
reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>There's no reason to think that reading
and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists
speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province
of a special "reading class," much as it was before the arrival of
mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn
that it probably won't regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may
just become "an increasingly arcane hobby." Such a shift would
change the texture of society. If one person decides to watch "The
Sopranos" rather than to read Leonardo Sciascia's novella "To
Each His Own," the culture goes on largely as before-both viewer
and reader are entertaining themselves while learning something about
the Mafia in the bargain. But if, over time, many people choose
television over books, then a nation's conversation with itself is
likely to change. A reader learns about the world and imagines it
differently from the way a viewer does; according to some experimental
psychologists, a reader and a viewer even think differently. If the
eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in
ways that aren't foreseeable.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Taking the long view, it's not the
neglect of reading that has to be explained but the fact that we read
at all. "The act of reading is not natural," Maryanne Wolf writes
in "Proust and the Squid" (Harper; $25.95), an account of the
history and biology of reading. Humans started reading far too
recently for any of our genes to code for it specifically. We can do
it only because the brain's plasticity enables the repurposing of
circuitry that originally evolved for other tasks-distinguishing at
a glance a garter snake from a haricot vert, say.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>The squid of Wolf's title represents
the neurobiological approach to the study of reading. Bigger cells are
easier for scientists to experiment on, and some species of squid have
optic-nerve cells a hundred times as thick as mammal neurons, and up
to four inches long, making them a favorite with biologists. (Two
decades ago, I had a summer job washing glassware in Cape Cod's
Marine Biological Laboratory. Whenever researchers extracted an optic
nerve, they threw the rest of the squid into a freezer, and about once
a month we took a cooler-full to the beach for grilling.) To symbolize
the humanistic approach to reading, Wolf has chosen Proust, who
described reading as "that fruitful miracle of a communication in
the midst of solitude." Perhaps inspired by Proust's example,
Wolf, a dyslexia researcher at Tufts, reminisces about the nuns who
taught her to read in a two-room brick schoolhouse in Illinois. But
she's more of a squid person than a Proust person, and seems most at
home when dissecting Proust's fruitful miracle into such brain parts
as the occipital "visual association area" and "area 37's
fusiform gyrus." Given the panic that takes hold of humanists when
the decline of reading is discussed, her cold-blooded perspective is
opportune.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Wolf recounts the early history of
reading, speculating about developments in brain wiring as she goes.
For example, from the eighth to the fifth millennia B.C.E., clay
tokens were used in Mesopotamia for tallying livestock and other
goods. Wolf suggests that, once the simple markings on the tokens were
understood not merely as squiggles but as representations of, say, ten
sheep, they would have put more of the brain to work. She draws on
recent research with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a
technique that maps blood flow in the brain during a given task, to
show that meaningful squiggles activate not only the occipital regions
responsible for vision but also temporal and parietal regions
associated with language and computation. If a particular squiggle was
repeated on a number of tokens, a group of nerves might start to
specialize in recognizing it, and other nerves to specialize in
connecting to language centers that handled its meaning.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>In the fourth millennium B.C.E., the
Sumerians developed cuneiform, and the Egyptians hieroglyphs. Both
scripts began with pictures of things, such as a beetle or a hand, and
then some of these symbols developed more abstract meanings,
representing ideas in some cases and sounds in others. Readers had to
recognize hundreds of symbols, some of which could stand for either a
word or a sound, an ambiguity that probably slowed down decoding.
Under this heavy cognitive burden, Wolf imagines, the Sumerian
reader's brain would have behaved the way modern brains do when
reading Chinese, which also mixes phonetic and ideographic elements
and seems to stimulate brain activity in a pattern distinct from that
of people reading the Roman alphabet. Frontal regions associated with
muscle memory would probably also have gone to work, because the
Sumerians learned their characters by writing them over and over, as
the Chinese do today.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Complex scripts like Sumerian and
Egyptian were written only by scribal élites. A major breakthrough
occurred around 750 B.C.E., when the Greeks, borrowing characters from
a Semitic language, perhaps Phoenician, developed a writing system
that had just twenty-four letters. There had been scripts with a
limited number of characters before, as there had been consonants and
even occasionally vowels, but the Greek alphabet was the first whose
letters recorded every significant sound element in a spoken language
in a one-to-one correspondence, give or take a few diphthongs. In
ancient Greek, if you knew how to pronounce a word, you knew how to
spell it, and you could sound out almost any word you saw, even if
you'd never heard it before. Children learned to read and write
Greek in about three years, somewhat faster than modern children learn
English, whose alphabet is more ambiguous. The ease democratized
literacy; the ability to read and write spread to citizens who
didn't specialize in it. The classicist Eric A. Havelock believed that
the alphabet changed "the character of the Greek
consciousness."</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Wolf doesn't quite second that claim.
She points out that it is possible to read efficiently a script that
combines ideograms and phonetic elements, something that many Chinese
do daily. The alphabet, she suggests, entailed not a qualitative
difference but an accumulation of small quantitative ones, by helping
more readers reach efficiency sooner. "The efficient reading brain,"
she writes, "quite literally has more time to think." Whether that
development sparked Greece's flowering she leaves to classicists to
debate, but she agrees with Havelock that writing was probably a
contributive factor, because it freed the Greeks from the necessity of
keeping their whole culture, including the Iliad and the Odyssey,
memorized.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>The scholar Walter J. Ong once speculated
that television and similar media are taking us into an era of
"secondary orality," akin to the primary orality that existed before
the emergence of text. If so, it is worth trying to understand how
different primary orality must have been from our own mind-set.
Havelock theorized that, in ancient Greece, the effort required to
preserve knowledge colored everything. In Plato's day, the word<i>
mimesis</i> referred to an actor's performance of his role, an
audience's identification with a performance, a pupil's recitation
of his lesson, and an apprentice's emulation of his master. Plato,
who was literate, worried about the kind of trance or emotional
enthrallment that came over people in all these situations, and
Havelock inferred from this that the idea of distinguishing the knower
from the known was then still a novelty. In a society that had only
recently learned to take notes, learning something still meant
abandoning yourself to it. "Enormous powers of poetic memorization
could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity,"
he wrote.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>It's difficult to prove that oral and
literate people think differently; orality, Havelock observed,
doesn't "fossilize" except through its nemesis, writing. But some
supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a
Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted
in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants
in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a
"graphic-functional" way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they
were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said
"dark blue" or "light yellow," but illiterates used metaphorical
names like "liver," "peach," "decayed teeth," and
"cotton in bloom." Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates
sometimes didn't. Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a
hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the
three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all
the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the
hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than
any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had
grouped the three tools together, discarding the log, replied,
"Whoever told you that must have been crazy," and another suggested,
"Probably he's got a lot of firewood." One frustrated
experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and
declared, "Now, clearly the child doesn't belong in this group,"
only to have a peasant answer:<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br>
<br>
Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are
working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch
things, they'll never get the job done, but the boy can do the
running for them.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Illiterates also resisted giving
definitions of words and refused to make logical inferences about
hypothetical situations. Asked by Luria's staff about polar bears, a
peasant grew testy: "What the cock knows how to do, he does. What I
know, I say, and nothing beyond that!" The illiterates did not talk
about themselves except in terms of their tangible possessions.
"What can I say about my own heart?" one asked.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>In the nineteen-seventies, the
psychologists Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole tried to replicate
Luria's findings among the Vai, a rural people in Liberia. Since
some Vai were illiterate, some were schooled in English, and others
were literate in the Vai's own script, the researchers hoped to be
able to distinguish cognitive changes caused by schooling from those
caused specifically by literacy. They found that English schooling and
English literacy improved the ability to talk about language and solve
logic puzzles, as literacy had done with Luria's peasants. But
literacy in Vai script improved performance on only a few
language-related tasks. Scribner and Cole's modest
conclusion-"Literacy makes some difference to some skills in some
contexts"-convinced some people that the literate mind was not so
different from the oral one after all. But others have objected that
it was misguided to separate literacy from schooling, suggesting that
cognitive changes came with the culture of literacy rather than with
the mere fact of it. Also, the Vai script, a syllabary with more than
two hundred characters, offered nothing like the cognitive efficiency
that Havelock ascribed to Greek. Reading Vai, Scribner and Cole
admitted, was "a complex problem-solving process," usually
performed slowly.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Soon after this study, Ong synthesized
existing research into a vivid picture of the oral mind-set. Whereas
literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed
their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve
ideas in the absence of writing is to "think memorable thoughts,"
whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché
and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is
frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There's no
such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an
audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more
memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in
name-calling and in "enthusiastic description of physical violence."
Since there's no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in
writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have
their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to
tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either
forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian
Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past's
inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages
skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Upon reaching classical Greece, Wolf
abandons history, because the Greeks' alphabet-reading brains
probably resembled ours, which can be readily put into scanners.
Drawing on recent imaging studies, she explains in detail how a modern
child's brain wires itself for literacy. The ground is laid in
preschool, when parents read to a child, talk with her, and encourage
awareness of sound elements like rhyme and alliteration, perhaps with
"Mother Goose" poems. Scans show that when a child first starts to
read she has to use more of her brain than adults do. Broad regions
light up in both hemispheres. As a child's neurons specialize in
recognizing letters and become more efficient, the regions activated
become smaller.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>At some point, as a child progresses from
decoding to fluent reading, the route of signals through her brain
shifts. Instead of passing along a "dorsal route" through
occipital, temporal, and parietal regions in both hemispheres, reading
starts to move along a faster and more efficient "ventral route,"
which is confined to the left hemisphere. With the gain in time and
the freed-up brainpower, Wolf suggests, a fluent reader is able to
integrate more of her own thoughts and feelings into her experience.
"The secret at the heart of reading," Wolf writes, is "the time it
frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came
before." Imaging studies suggest that in many cases of dyslexia the
right hemisphere never disengages, and reading remains effortful.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>In a recent book claiming that television
and video games were "making our minds sharper," the journalist
Steven Johnson argued that since we value reading for "exercising
the mind," we should value electronic media for offering a superior
"cognitive workout." But, if Wolf's evidence is right,
Johnson's metaphor of exercise is misguided. When reading goes well,
Wolf suggests, it feels effortless, like drifting down a river rather
than rowing up it. It makes you smarter because it leaves more of your
brain alone. Ruskin once compared reading to a conversation with the
wise and noble, and Proust corrected him. It's much better than
that, Proust wrote. To read is "to receive a communication with
another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while
continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude
and that conversation dissipates immediately."<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Wolf has little to say about the general
decline of reading, and she doesn't much speculate about the
function of the brain under the influence of television and newer
media. But there is research suggesting that secondary orality and
literacy don't mix. In a study published this year, experimenters
varied the way that people took in a PowerPoint presentation about the
country of Mali. Those who were allowed to read silently were more
likely to agree with the statement "The presentation was
interesting," and those who read along with an audiovisual
commentary were more likely to agree with the statement "I did not
learn anything from this presentation." The silent readers
remembered more, too, a finding in line with a series of British
studies in which people who read transcripts of television newscasts,
political programs, advertisements, and science shows recalled more
information than those who had watched the shows
themselves.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>The antagonism between words and moving
images seems to start early. In August, scientists at the University
of Washington revealed that babies aged between eight and sixteen
months know on average six to eight fewer words for every hour of baby
DVDs and videos they watch daily. A 2005 study in Northern California
found that a television in the bedroom lowered the standardized-test
scores of third graders. And the conflict continues throughout a
child's development. In 2001, after analyzing data on more than a
million students around the world, the researcher Micha Razel found
"little room for doubt" that television worsened performance in
reading, science, and math. The relationship wasn't a straight line
but "an inverted check mark": a small amount of television seemed
to benefit children; more hurt. For nine-year-olds, the optimum was
two hours a day; for seventeen-year-olds, half an hour. Razel guessed
that the younger children were watching educational shows, and,
indeed, researchers have shown that a five-year-old boy who watches
"Sesame Street" is likely to have higher grades even in high school.
Razel noted, however, that fifty-five per cent of students were
exceeding their optimal viewing time by three hours a day, thereby
lowering their academic achievement by roughly one grade level.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>The Internet, happily, does not so far
seem to be antagonistic to literacy. Researchers recently gave
Michigan children and teen-agers home computers in exchange for
permission to monitor their Internet use. The study found that grades
and reading scores rose with the amount of time spent online. Even
visits to pornography Web sites improved academic performance. Of
course, such synergies may disappear if the Internet continues its
YouTube-fuelled evolution away from print and toward television.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>No effort of will is likely to make
reading popular again. Children may be browbeaten, but adults resist
interference with their pleasures. It may simply be the case that many
Americans prefer to learn about the world and to entertain themselves
with television and other streaming media, rather than with the
printed word, and that it is taking a few generations for them to shed
old habits like newspapers and novels. The alternative is that we are
nearing the end of a pendulum swing, and that reading will return,
driven back by forces as complicated as those now driving it away.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>But if the change is permanent, and
especially if the slide continues, the world will feel different, even
to those who still read. Because the change has been happening slowly
for decades, everyone has a sense of what is at stake, though it is
rarely put into words. There is something to gain, of course, or no
one would ever put down a book and pick up a remote. Streaming media
give actual pictures and sounds instead of mere descriptions of them.
"Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium," Marshall
McLuhan proclaimed in 1967. Moving and talking images are much richer
in information about a performer's appearance, manner, and tone of
voice, and they give us the impression that we know more about her
health and mood, too. The viewer may not catch all the details of a
candidate's health-care plan, but he has a much more definite sense
of her as a personality, and his response to her is therefore likely
to be more full of emotion. There is nothing like this connection in
print. A feeling for a writer never touches the fact of the writer
herself, unless reader and writer happen to meet. In fact, from
Shakespeare to Pynchon, the personalities of many writers have been
mysterious.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Emotional responsiveness to streaming
media harks back to the world of primary orality, and, as in Plato's
day, the solidarity amounts almost to a mutual possession.
"Electronic technology fosters and encourages unification and
involvement," in McLuhan's words. The viewer feels at home with
his show, or else he changes the channel. The closeness makes it hard
to negotiate differences of opinion. It can be amusing to read a
magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to
watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary
orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree
with.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Self-doubt, therefore, becomes less
likely. In fact, doubt of any kind is rarer. It is easy to notice
inconsistencies in two written accounts placed side by side. With
text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority
behind different pieces of information. The trust that a reader grants
to the New York<i> Times</i>, for example, may vary sentence by
sentence. A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is
cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on
television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed
before he started watching. Like the peasants studied by Luria, he
thinks in terms of situations and story lines rather than
abstractions.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>And he may have even more trouble than
Luria's peasants in seeing himself as others do. After all, there is
no one looking back at the television viewer. He is alone, though he,
and his brain, may be too distracted to notice it. The reader is also
alone, but the N.E.A. reports that readers are more likely than
non-readers to play sports, exercise, visit art museums, attend
theatre, paint, go to music events, take photographs, and volunteer.
Proficient readers are also more likely to vote. Perhaps readers
venture so readily outside because what they experience in solitude
gives them confidence. Perhaps reading is a prototype of independence.
No matter how much one worships an author, Proust wrote, "all he can
do is give us desires." Reading somehow gives us the boldness to act
on them. Such a habit might be quite dangerous for a democracy to
lose. ܶ</blockquote>
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</pre></x-sigsep>
<div><font face="Euphemia UCAS" color="#000000"><i><b>D. Charles
Whitney, Professor and Chair<br>
</b>Department of Creative Writing, 4126 INTS<br>
University of California, Riverside 900 University
Ave.<br>
Riverside, CA 92521 951.827.6076 FAX
951.827.3619</i></font></div>
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