Teach students to e-read
Lessons on how to concentrate on long texts online must be included in the curriculum
At the beginning of every semester, the
journalism students I teach lament the difficulty in reading long texts and
focussing on the meaning of the words in front of them.
“I get my news from Twitter,” one of them
said, as if Twitter were a news source and not a social networking website with
aggregating capacities. News distributed on social networks is news often
reported by someone somewhere in a newspaper, on a television website, or a
blog. Social networks condense the meaning of the news article into 140
characters (now upped to 280), leaving little meaning there.
Class assignments are long articles to be
read on the course’s website. Students have to understand, research, comment
and critique — all online.
Halfway through the semester, I notice that
all their skills improve. They articulate better. They research with depth.
Clearly, the capacity to absorb the material studied has expanded. This is
because it is forced to expand, in order that they get good grades.
The medium is the message
Students are encouraged to contribute their
opinions and ideas to the lively topic of how the Internet is changing our
brains. We discuss, for example, how Socrates in Phaedrus said the alphabet would bring an end
to our capacity to memorise ideas. How, since those days of ancient Greek
wisdom, the advent of a new medium has always generated new, at times useful,
Cassandras. Fear of the new: neophobia.
We also discuss the ideas of Nicholas Carr,
who, in his book The
Shallows — How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, described
what the loss of the kind of deep thought we reach with focussed reading can do
to our minds. We look at what Camille Paglia says about a society obsessed with
images: it can sink in the present without understanding the context and the
meaning of what is really happening in that present. Pierre Bourdieu dissects
the impact of TV on culture, explaining how talk shows threaten science and academia,
for example. Deleuze, Derrida, Baudrillard — all the complicated French minds
are summoned to make things even harder and to explain how our perception of
reality is altered by a new medium. But, mostly, we gaze into the prophetic
views of Marshall McLuhan and his “medium is the message” mantra. It’s not what
you say that has a real impact on society, it’s the medium you use which will
alter everything in society, especially perceptions. And thus, in the
Internet’s case, our capacity to focus on reading.
Feeling versus knowing
Our constant usage of the Internet threatens
our reading capacity, it is commonly said. It results in our decreasing
capacity to concentrate, think and understand things as we were used to. And
while the decision-making part of our brain works in overdrive by clicking,
skimming, browsing, liking, sharing, bookmarking, it is true that we are
choosing faster, but we are not understanding in depth what we chose and why we
chose what we did.
In class, we’ve discussed what we’re looking
for when we’re on the Internet, which is almost always. Although we may think
we are looking for information, news, novelties, we realised that it mostly
boils down to emotions. We tell ourselves we’re looking for data and facts on
which to base our opinions. But once we ask ourselves the simple “why?”, the
deep answer is not “in order to know,” but “so that we can feel.”
Novelties. We seek the quick, constant
gratification of empty news, not having time to understand their meaning in our
lives. The power of news then — the power to inform, to put a new shape to the
concepts in our minds — gets lost. We feel, but we do not know. And if we don’t
know, it’ll be even easier to manipulate us.
The motto of the zeitgeist is images, not
words. But images have a double-edged power. We click and see a man squatting
to protect his genitals from attacking dogs in an American prison. We click and
we see a rockstar twerking in hot pants. Twerking, torture, pain, dance,
glamour, cruelty — it’s all the same. On the same screen. Quickly alternating.
It’s the Internet.
“It is making us feel jaded,” admitted one
student.
Proposing solutions
In this open laboratory of thought about the
impact of the Internet on our brains and our capacity to absorb knowledge, we
force ourselves to understand and we push to discuss and propose solutions. And
we have reached a simple proposal based on these premises: isn’t reading taught
in classrooms? Aren’t we accompanied on our first steps to understand the
meaning of letters, words, ideograms? As much as reading on paper needs to be
inculcated in order to be mastered, so does e-reading.
We have many techniques to propose to the
Ministry of Human Resource Development. They can be applied at the same age
when children learn to read. Provide a screen and connectivity, Mark
Zuckerberg, sure. But dish out funds to teach us how to connect, research,
discover, and also how to disconnect, reflect, focus, until we’ve finished
reading a long text online. How to click on hypertext only once we’ve reached
the end of an article and then, and only then, we may go back to deepen our
understanding, to search for more knowledge. This is how we will be able to
prove that reading online is just as good as reading on paper: by learning how
to do it right.
Yes, you can read long texts online. Deep
reading. But you have to learn the self-discipline needed to absorb the
information and make it become knowledge. The way children are reprimanded if
their attention wanders off while reading on paper as they learn how to focus,
the same can be explained when training to e-read. Turn off the 3G or WiFi and
keep your eyes on the screen until you’ve reached the end of all these
paragraphs. Then explore the Web for more. In order to deepen our independent
gaze into reality, we must be helped to wade through the metastasis of
communication surrounding us, so we may battle the anorexia of true
information: knowledge.
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Knowledge
Repository
Khaitan & Co
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