Can you spot fake news?
Free, essential book can help you learn to read anew in our fraught digital era
You’re probably just going to skim this article, but that’s OK.
I mean, I suppose I’d prefer if you savor every last morsel I’ve spent hours worrying over to provide you the best possible reading experience, but if skimming is all you’ve got, I’ll take it.
The first yelp of alarm over the impact of the internet on our attention spans I can recall is journalist Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” published in the July/ August 2008 issue of The Atlantic and later expanded to book length in “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.”
The recent release of “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World” by Tufts professor Maryanne Wolf, an expert in reading and literacy, marks the unofficial 10-year anniversary of being worried about what the internet may be doing to our capacity to “read deeply.”
“Deep reading” is essentially a sustained engagement with a single — ideally “difficult” — text, and the research of Wolf and others link deep reading to, in Wolf ’s words, “some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight.”
In other words, reading deeply helps us learn to think deeply. Wolf and Carr both believe that deep reading and its associated benefits are vital to maintaining, again in Wolf ’s words, “the ability of citizens in a vibrant democracy to try on other perspectives and discern truth.”
You will find no bigger champion of deep reading than yours truly. Deep reading has sustained my spirit through much of my life. The chance to sink into a book and then think deeply about books is the lifeblood of this very column, which I’ve been writing for more than six years.
I also am sympathetic to Carr’s complaint that the internet has made it harder to sustain concentration than before. No doubt, the siren call of a quick hit of social media is often alluring.
But here’s the thing: If we truly want to protect our vibrant democracy and discern truth, deep reading is not the solution. Helping people get much better at skimming is.
Changes in society lead to shifts in the demands of literacy, and we happen to be in the midst of one of those shifts right now. Big shifts are often discomforting, but they also cannot be wished away.
In 2016, researchers at Stanford sought to measure the capabilities of young people to engage in “civic online reasoning” and found their abilities wanting. Young people are not outliers in this regard. We olds have troubles of our own when it comes to discerning fact from fiction on the internet.
And deep reading isn’t a help. In a subsequent study, Stanford pitted groups of professional historians, students and professional fact-checkers against one another in determining the veracity of online information. Historians were frequently fooled by bogus sites. Fact-checkers were not.
“Civic online reasoning” is simply a different skill from deep reading, and while we should have space for deep reading, the lack of abilities in civic online reading is something close to a national crisis.
To improve those abilities, I have just what you need: a book. Even better, it’s a free book.
Mike Caulfield, director of blended and online learning at Washington State University Vancouver, has written “Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers … and Other People Who Care About Facts,” and it will retrain you in the ways to read and act when evaluating information on the internet.
It is a skill I’m working on, but each day, I get a bit better. You can too.