I feel like the biggest question the professor is asking us is definitely the first one: How do you think digital technology has transformed our society’s experience of reading and writing?
Just the other day, I was watching TV and there was a commercial that had to do with a kid learning to read. I don’t know about you, but I love any commercial that promotes reading as being cool and an important part of a kid growing up and NOT just as a part of their education. However, one thing bothered me. It was how the kid was reading and what they were using to read. The child looked fairly young and was on their parent’s lap, giggling while reading on an electronic device. I instantly disliked the commercial and was very upset that the child was learning to read using a device that was animated, showed digital images, and had audio. I thought to myself: this is not reading. I am trying to figure out what upset me so much about this child enjoying reading through stimuli that more than the text on a page and a picture that didn’t move. Whenever I think about it, it still bothers me and I can’t put my finger on it. I keep thinking, this is not how a child should learn to read! In case you’re interested, you can watch the commercial here.
Growing up I remember how much I loved books, their pages, and how I could read the same page over and over, create voices in my head and let my OWN brain do the work in creating moving pictures. The story wasn’t shown to me in some Flash application that required a batter, but my own mind and creativity. Perhaps THAT is what is at stake here. The child’s imagination. How can we be expected to train our brains to think analytically, creatively and independently if we start learning how to read and gain information through an electronic device that does it for us? If kids are able to learn how to read like the commercial above, why not just put on a move with subtitles and call it learning to read? I feel that if we continue to let kids learn to read like they are today, we are risking their imagination and their creativity. They should learn to think independently and allow their mind to grow and change like ours do today when we pick up a book for the second time. Do we not have different thoughts and perceptions when we read a book more than once? Do our ideas and images not change every time a story is told? If a child picks up a digital book like the V-tech reader, are they not being inhibited by the provided information that in NEVER changing? I am honestly concerned for the next generations future of thinking critically and creatively. Please tell me I am not alone!
An interesting contrast to your thoughts can be found in Landow’s “Hypertext and Critical Theory” series. While he admits that “Contemporary screens, which have neither the portability nor the tactility of printed books, make the act of reading somewhat more difficult” (as many other posts have similarly noted), he also compares hypertextual or on-screen reading to reading a postmodern text, at least in its motivating ideology. He says:
As a reader, you must to decide whether to return to my argument, pursue some of the connections I suggest by links, or, using other capacities of the system, search for connections I have not suggested. The multiplicity of hypertext, which appears in multiple links to individual blocks of text, calls for an active reader.
You seem to be bothered by a child’s learning to read by way of digital texts because you feel that the child isn’t using his/her “OWN brain” to “do the work”–essentially, working their imagination. In light of Landow’s suggestions, it would see that hypertextual reading requires the reader to be more active, rather than passive, as you suggest. Perhaps because a child isn’t able to navigate skillfully online, Landow’s argument fails. Or, perhaps the potential to navigate will enhance the child’s capacity to move beyond a text, in which case, making them more creative or imaginative.
I really enjoyed reading your post, I had never seen that commercial before and I am shocked! I agree with you and think as well that a child’s imagination is at stake here because they don’t have to imagine anything, it’s all done for them by the touch of a button. This is a negative example, to me, of technology and what it is doing to society.
I agree with you as well, Brittney, and I think that Landow is talking about something completely different. Yes, in some ways it is more difficult to read on-screen (I certainly find it so), but that does not mean that it challenges our imaginations. Digital reading may be an active experience, but it is not a creative one, and I think that is a vital distinction to draw. Sure, you might have to be actively engaged to follow hypertext and navigate branching pathways, but as Brittney says, if you’re learning to read on a digital device with moving pictures and sound, you are not being asked to create the fictional world inside your head like we were when we learned to read.
We’re talking about two completely different ways of thinking. Reading taught us to think creatively, to imagine characters and settings and scenes. What is reading teaching those who learn on digital devices? A completely different set of skills that can and will be learned elsewhere. Digitization is the future, and digital literacy will likely become as important and widespread as literacy is today, so our children will learn to be digitally literate.
If we stop teaching them to read with physical books, though, how will they acquire those imaginative skills? What other media asks us to think in the same way that reading does, to work as hard as reading does? When you think about it, reading asks an awful lot of us. A book (once we graduate past picture books) is nothing but an endless string of words (which could pretty easily be conceived of as boring, especially to today’s hyper-technological youth, used to being constantly inundated with various forms of media stimuli) out of which we have to do the work of mentally creating the world that an author describes to us. What a terrible, terrifying thought to think of future generations failing to acquire this skill.
i agree with you brittany… nowadays imagination is the last thing being used because digital toys having pictures for kids already moving around.. and the child’s imagination is limited to those pictures. Same is the case with fairy tales because Disney has made a movie on every book that comes out. We really need to start thinking when introducing such devices or toys to our children as to how this will affect them. Some may be helpful, and may keep them busy, however, it should not interfere with the child’s ability to imagine…
Does the multimedia approach of the product advertised the commercial constitute a use of the imagination or does it not? Does imagination help one acquire reading skills or is it fuelled by the practice of those skills once acquired. Whatever the answer, the key term is “imagination”, a concept central to the study of the Humanities.