The New York Times front page yesterday sported an article with the oh-so-hip headline “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?.” This turned out to be impressively stupid even by the standards of articles with clumsy slang in the headlines:
Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.
As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.
Look, I’m as big a fan of books as anyone– I’m writing one, and I do it sitting in a room with several hundred hardcovers (the paperbacks are upstairs). But this is idiotic. Reading is reading, even if it’s done on a computer. Even if it’s done on fanfiction.net.
But the Times treats us to several pages of hand-wringing about whether reading on-line really “counts.” Which does allow them to write the article about and for their core demographic of wealthy white suburbanites, which is great for the marketing department, but it kind of misses the real problem, namely the people who don’t even read on-line. Spending hours on fanfiction.net doesn’t indicate a highly developed critical faculty, but the essential process of reading and evaluating stories is not medium-dependent.
Of course, it’s not entirely surprising that the parents in the story aren’t comfortable with that, given that they don’t even realize that books aren’t fungible:
Web junkies can occasionally be swept up in a book. After Nadia read Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night” in her freshman English class, Ms. Konyk brought home another Holocaust memoir, “I Have Lived a Thousand Years,” by Livia Bitton-Jackson.
Nadia was riveted by heartbreaking details of life in the concentration camps. “I was trying to imagine this and I was like, I can’t do this,” she said. “It was just so — wow.”
Hoping to keep up the momentum, Ms. Konyk brought home another book, “Silverboy,” a fantasy novel. Nadia made it through one chapter before she got engrossed in the Internet fan fiction again.
I shouldn’t be too harsh– she did get it right once. But honestly, books are different. Just because somebody read two books in a row and liked them, doesn’t mean they’ll read just anything you put in front of them. Silverboy may be a fine book, but nothing in its plot description suggests that it would appeal to someone who likes Holocaust memoirs.
If a kid likes Holocaust memoirs, it’s not like there’s a great shortage of those. If you really want to shift her tastes from memoir toward fantasy fiction, there’s always Briar Rose by Jane Yolen, or The Red Magician, which probably push some of the same buttons.
This is the core problem with “Must-Read Books” lists– books are not fungible. You can’t draw up a list of Great Books that will appeal to absolutely everyone– different things appeal to different readers, and one person’s Great Book will be a dreary slog for someone whose tastes run in a different direction. If you want to nurse along somebody’s interest in reading, you need to work with what you know of their tastes, not just hand them acclaimed books at random.
If the kid likes Holocaust memoirs, give her more of those. If you want to get daring, try some different types of memoir. If you want to move her toward fiction, give her memoir-ish fiction.
For that matter, if she likes fan fiction, give her some tie-in novels. Wear a bag over your head while you’re in the store, and pay cash if you’re embarrassed to be seen buying them. You may think they’re trash, but kids who start out reading trash often graduate to better stuff– the important thing is to get the habit set.
Too many parents and teachers fail to grasp this point. I sometimes think that a great deal of the problem we have with reading in this country is the result of horribly misguided reading assignments for impressionable school kids.
Seems to me that the problem is that those impressionable school kids aren’t exactly as impressionable as the parent/teacher book pushers expect.
My junior year of high school, one of our late-term essays was to describe which of the books we had read so far was least deserving of being in the curriculum, and why. It was a brilliant choice of assignment.
I don’t care what kids are reading as long as they are reading. I read mainly Science Fiction, but I read about 100 science fiction novels a year. Plus about 50 other books. My son is Dyslexic. It was a struggle, but we finally have him reading. I don’t care if he read mysteries, science fiction, or Harry Potter, as long as he reads. Even with the internet, if you can’t read, you ability to learn is greatly compromised.
I got my main introduction to reading long novel form science fiction mostly through Star Wars books. Then again they aren’t the trashiest of books, and many of the authors are actually seriously good writers even stripped of the brand name.
Before that there were the seemingly endless series of books like Animorphs and Goosebumps. Even though you could get through each book in a couple of hours, there were always enough to keep you going as long as your parents wallets held out.
One of the great things about these series, and the branded tie ins or sagas, is the lack of risk. Your average kid is unlikely to pick up a random 300+ page novel unless they have a good reason to believe it is worth the effort. Once they are seasoned readers they will learn how to make such judgements. When they have some access to the genre, they will know which authors are probably worth their time. When they read the right fanzines, magazines, blogs and articles they might know which new authors and books are worth an investment. Before that, they are probably going to pass up most of what they would love through simply not knowing how to find it.
If you see the Star Wars name on the cover (and are a big enough geek) the odds are you will think the effort (and cost) is worth it. For the rapid fire series, the first book is a minor commitment, and then the others are no risk at all – you know exactly what you are getting.
One of the interesting things for me is author referrals and name power. The two reasons I got obsessed with popular science during my GCSE’s and A-levels were Adams and Pratchett (NB – I view Pratchett as a brandname in his own right). Pratchett because he (co)wrote one, and Adams because he lavished huge praise on Dawkins, making me pick up The Blind Watchmaker and triggering my slow decent into internet madness.
The same is true within fiction itself. When Reynolds refers to a dozen or so authors at the end of one of his books, the odds are I’m going to give them at least a second glance next time I’m in Borders. Again, the risk of being disappointed is greatly reduced.
Finally, free e-books (like those offered by Tor, at least for a little while longer, and by individual authors like Doctorow and Scalzi) offer people at least a cost free way to get into new authors and genres, even if they still represent some risk (as a time investment). I’m guessing that such offers are likely to draw in far more readers from the websavy, fanfic loving groups than simply putting the books in a library would manage.
Jim C, same here. My dyslexic daughter right now is reading Katharine Hepburn’s autobiography, and when she is finished with that, she will read a biography of Audrey Hepburn. She is interested in fashion, so she reads InStyle and Teen Vogue. No, she doesn’t just look at the pictures! Any time she picks up reading material or goes to a web page, I’m happy because she is getting practice at decoding words. As for fanfiction, there is quite a range in the writing ability of participants. Readers will at least get practice in reading; in some cases they will be exposed to clever and sophisticated writing. (Truth in packaging: I post to fanfiction.net in the LOTR book ‘verse’. That’s the source of my pseudonym.)
I think the NYT piece (are they getting worse lately, or am I just paying more attention?) sounds like it is conflating two things.
The first, is hand-wringing over high culture (represented by books, and the NYT) and low culture (represented by fanfiction on the internet. I have no patience for that, especially since I think NYT belongs in the later category and Scienceblogs in the former.
However, the second issue is the way you read internet vs. print. If you read on the internet the way you read books, you are missing out on lots the internet has to offer. There may be a genuine generational difference here. Generation.com really doesn’t read the internet the same way their parents tend to. The internet does require cultivation of speed reading/scanning skills beyond any print medium (of course, people of any age can develop this skill). So the attention span thing may be a legitimate downside.
While I do not have an explanation for the falling scores on standardized reading comprehension tests, has any previous generation really been as surrounded (bombarded even) by text as the current batch of teenagers?
I tried – and failed – to get a nephew of mine interested in books, any books, a few years back. Last time I met him he was carrying a thick Stephen King novel. In English, which isn’t his (nor my) native language.
Part of the problem with the net is that people don’t naturally know how to search for things. I’ve been using the net since it was text based and know how to find things.
Then there’s books.google.com, I absolutely adore that site.
Web entries are a kilobyte of text. A book requires sustained attention. Inert intelligence is the paradigm of institutional racism. Contemporary society is dedicated to destruction of the individual. Anybody who is in good company when alone must be saved (destroyed).
Introspection is a committed act against the State. Books threaten national security. Be amorphous and dispersed or be destroyed. It’s all about closing the gap, therapist or the|rapist.
Chad writes: Reading is reading, even if it’s done on a computer.
Sure, but there may be a difference in the kind of attention or concentration or memory involved in reading a novel or a long article, versus reading lots of really short posts. They may not have the same effect on the intellectual development of the reader.
I’ll be the contrarian here and suggest that maybe this article *is* on to something. I don’t care so much about the high-culture or low-culture nature of the content as the fact that there is a real difference between reading a 100,000 word book — or even a 10,000 word magazine article — and a whole bunch of unrelated 500 word blog postings, emails, and Wikipedia entries. I believe that the ability to read long texts that tell an extended story or make an extended argument is a valuable skill that may be lost in “internet reading”.
For another look at this idea, see this article in the Atlantic magazine. (Of course, those likely to be skeptical of this may just say “TL;DR”…)
Unfortunately, the ScienceBlogs preview function does not allow me to see comments that have shown up while composing, so I couldn’t credit Daryl’s comment…
Sure, there’s a difference between reading 500 word blog entries and a 100,000 word book. There’s a difference between reading fan fiction and “real” books, though not always as big a gap as some people would like to claim. What adults too often seem to not understand is that we read lots of different things; not all of what I read is high brow literature. I read blog entries and magazine articles and formulaic genre novels as well as literature and non-fiction. And my 13 year old daughter does too; she just does it differently. Like many kids, her phases are longer for the low brow stuff. She’ll spend many more hours reading fan fiction than I could stomach before I have to move on to something else, but I don’t really see how that’s markedly different from me plowing through book after book of Nancy Drew or Trixie Belden when I was a kid.
We both read for pleasure. At any given point, for either one of us, what that means varies. The problem is not that kids are reading stuff online, the problem is that most people, kids or adult, don’t read much of anything.
Hank @ 6:
While I do not have an explanation for the falling scores on standardized reading comprehension tests ….
I’m not sure it’s necessary to have an explanation, since it’s not at clear that score are falling. The NY Times article provides no solid references to support this idea; the NEA study they mention is actually just a survey of reading habits, and one that was, moreover, restricted to “literature” (defined as novels, short stories, plays, or poetry — so the Holocaust memoirs that Nadia read wouldn’t have counted!).
This post (which has a link to the relevant study) points out that reading comprehension scores for teenagers circa 2004 were essentially unchanged from, or slightly higher than, reading scores in the 1970s.
Shorter NY Times article:
“Reading long books might (possibly) be better for you than reading lots of short articles. So don’t waste time reading newspapers!”