[Cwgrad-announcements] Fwd: Caleb Crain's NYer article

[Charles Whitney]

This from Andrew Winer, and I agree that it's an 
important argument.  If you'd prefer the link, 
here it is:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain

>From: "Andrew Winer" <andrew.winer at ucr.edu>
>To: "Charles Whitney" <Chuck.Whitney at ucr.edu>
>Subject: Caleb Crain's NYer article
>Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2007 16:48:53 -0800
>X-Junkmail-Whitelist: YES (by domain whitelist at sentrell.ucr.edu)
>
>Hi Chuck,
>
>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.
>
>-Andrew
>
>
>Twilight of the Books
>
>What will life be like if people stop reading?
>
>by 
><http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?query=authorName:%22Caleb 
>Crain%22>Caleb Crain December 24, 2007
>
>
>
>
>A recent study has shown a steep decline in 
>literary reading among schoolchildren.
>
>
>
>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.
>
>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."
>
>This decline is not news to those who depend on 
>print for a living. In 1970, according to Editor 
>& Publisher International Year Book, 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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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."
>
>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.
>
>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 mimesis 
>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.
>
>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:
>
>
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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."
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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 
>Times, 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.
>
>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. ܶ


-- 
D. Charles Whitney, Professor and Chair
Department of Creative Writing, 4126 INTS
University of California, Riverside    900 University Ave.
Riverside, CA 92521   951.827.6076  FAX 951.827.3619
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