Iterating literacy...

The practice of reading words on paper appears to be dying. Reading's impending death has been covered (ironically) by all the newspapers. If you run a google search on "death of reading" you'll find hundreds of articles covering reading's demise, in papers ranging from the Washington Post to the Washington Times (I can assure you, that's quite a wide spectrum). You'd have to be a total non-reader to have missed all of the stories about the NEA (the National Endowment for the Arts, not the National Education Association) studies "Reading at Risk" and "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence" which chronicle our growing "ignorance". These studies focus on non-readers, in particular on teenagers, citing alarming statistics on all the reading they're not doing and the societal dissolution their illiteracy will bring.

The Washington Times editorial page strikes a typically grim and shrill tone "Here are some of the troubling highlights...from 1982 to 2002, the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds who read literature dropped from 60 percent to 43 percent. Fifty-two percent of the same age demographic said they read a book voluntarily in 2002, which is down from 59 percent a decade earlier...Our increasing failure to read constitutes a kind of creeping national illiteracy which should concern everyone, not simply librarians and booksellers. Literacy is an integral aspect of civil society. Substance, culture and literature should not be the ironic casualties of the Information Age." I love those value-laden words - "substance" and "culture". Of course we accept that the Washington Times editorial board is the arbiter of substance and culture (this is the newspaper published by Sun Myung Moon, the wacko Unification Church leader who maintains that he's the new Messiah).

This is one of the rare issues on which the Washington Times and the Washington Post agree. Here's this from the Washington Post "More than half the adults in this country won't pick up a novel this year, according to the NEA. Not one. And the rate of decline has almost tripled in the past decade...". Reading's mourners share a tone of gloom and doom, and warn us against creeping ignorance. The future they depict is one of drooling idiots pounding their keyboards and wiggling their joysticks, barely able to feed themselves. We must make children read (they seldom mention adults, they know how much luck they'd have trying to make adults read)! Good luck, I say.

I'm not feeling the gloom. I have to wonder. Which way are we facing when we wail and gnash our teeth about the decline of printed word literacy, forward or backward? Is it okay that reading is fading in importance, or is it a sign of the coming apocalypse?

On the apocalypse team are academics like Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, along with all the newspapers and the NEA. Wolf's been making the rounds of high-brow talk shows, expertly reinforcing our fear of reading's demise whilst flogging her book "Proust and the Squid" - a not-so-aptly named treatise on how reading shapes our brain. Wolf argues that reading is an acquired skill that forces us to think deeply and synthesize information. She further argues that if reading fades in our culture, we will lose that ability to think deeply and digest (not just consume) information. She fears that reading will not survive the onslaught of "digitization", and that its potential loss is serious and saddening.

For every printed word literacy pessimist like Maryanne Wolf, there's an optimistic digital literacy champion like Henry Jenkins , the professor of New Media Literacy at MIT. Jenkins and a number of other researchers think we educators should redefine literacy to represent the way that people, especially teenagers, are engaging in the digital world. According to Henry, educators like Maryanne Wolf are building a "Maginot Line" in a hopeless attempt to defend reading and children against the encroaching digital world. He argues that we need to "...identify skills, knowledge, and competencies young people need to become meaningful participants in the 21st century culture around them – skills central to citizenship, community life, and cultural expression...in this new landscape of video games, cell phones, podcasting, blogging, instant messaging and other kinds of media-intensive experiences, children are participants – not spectators, not consumers in the traditional sense of the term. These new media forms and the cultures that emerge around them offer young people new opportunities for emotional growth and intellectual development but also require new kinds of ethical responsibilities. The goal of media literacy education in the 21st century should be to prepare kids to live within a more participatory media culture..."

So, which is it - doom or boom? I love to read. I read two newspapers a day (I think I'm one of the Boston Globe's last 4 readers). I also generally have a book or two going (I'm halfway through "The Looming Tower" and "Spook Country" at the moment, in case you're wondering). But I understand that just because the Washington Times editorial board and the NEA think we're going to hell in an iPod basket, there's no way we can force teens or adults read more ("No dessert until you eat your Proustian spinach!"). I don't think that we're reading less because we have suddenly become dumber, or shallower. I think it's that there are much more engaging media available to us. The printed word has always been a narrow form of communication, engaging only one of our senses (and that one only indirectly), while forcing us to adapt to the form, not vice-versa. Even Maryanne Wolf admits that our brains are not well-suited for reading. She explains that our brains go through a process of rewiring to match the medium of printed texts, and a significant percentage of us, known as dyslexics, never fully adapt. Maybe reading is fading because it is poorly suited to our abilities, and the new digital media are more powerful alternatives. It may be that bemoaning our fading printed word proficiency in 2010 is akin to anguishing over the weakening wrists of teamsters who no longer needed to wield buggy whips to drive cars in 1910.

The new media are not only more engaging, they are much, MUCH more democratic. For most of the past 500+ years the printing press was the only mass media game in town. The media were controlled by those who owned the means of production, first in the form of books and newspapers, and then more recently, television and radio. If you wanted to publish something, or broadcast something, you had to own the printing press or the TV station (ham radio operators being the exception). Then suddenly, over the past 15-20 years, an economic & technological revolution has taken place in media. The internet gives each of us the ability to broadcast our creations to the entire wired world! And not just an email, or a blog post, we can post movies, slide shows, music, etc. Video cameras can be had for a few hundred dollars today, instead of tens of thousands. To edit a video 15 years ago required an investment of $150,000, now anyone who owns a Mac or an XP computer can do it for free. Every teenager can (and does) build their own web site. Podcasts are as easy to make as a newsletter (perhaps easier). Of course the Washington Post and the Washington Times should feel wretched about our declining interest in printed texts, because they have lost their monopoly.

I understand that this revolution has trade-offs. I love that I can post 2000 word opinions on my blog every week, and no longer risk the indignity of having my 150 word letters rejected by the Boston Globe (what do they know?). But I also recognize that I can't afford to have a news bureau in Islamabad or Indonesia. Nor can I be assured of the quality of everything that is posted to Youtube, or MySpace. One of the biggest challenges in the explosion of digital media is keeping up with it all, and finding the nuggets hidden in all the dross. I sincerely hope that someone like Goodreads will come up with a Goodfeeds, where we can all let each other know about the latest podcasts, vodcasts, web sites, etc that we've found (what are your favorites?).

So what do you think? Will the next generation be a bunch of simpletons with tiny brains and over-sized thumbs? Will we soon lose the pleasure of spending a rainy afternoon in a bookstore cafe, sipping a mocha choca latte yaya and thumbing through the latest William Gibson? When they go online, "is our children learning?" (you gotta love it when the Washington Times complains about declining literacy while endorsing George Dumberer Bush for President). Should public schools use whips and chairs to make kids read? What should literacy look like 10 years from now?