This is the fourth in a series of posts about Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. You can read the introductory post and find links to other posts in the series here.
“Will the quality of our attention change as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focusing of attention?”
maryanne wolf, Reader, Come Home
In Reader, Come Home, Maryanne Wolf points out that while we may be reading just as much as ever (we may very well be reading more than ever) the quality of our reading has become shallow. She connects this to our inundation with digital media which comes with its own set of values: immediacy, distraction, clicks, clicks, clicks…
All this means that our attention is fragmented with implications for our internalized knowledge and our ability to critically analyze the information we’re absorbing. Our reading is wide but shallow:
“We do not see or hear with the same quality of attention because we see and hear too much, become habituated, and then still seek more.”
–Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home
Maryanne Wolf mentions two useful terms to describe what we experience when we scroll through our phones: novelty bias and continuous partial attention. Novelty bias is the urgent desire to be aware of anything new. Continues partial attention describes the way we flit from one stimulus to the next, rarely pausing to take any one thing in.
For me, this is what I experience when I refresh my news app or Instagram only ten minutes after I refreshed it the last time. It’s what keeps us glued to our phones, checking a new text message the second our screen glows, longing for something new to “read” and then, once it has appeared, not taking the time to read it.
What’s the Big Deal? Do We Even Need Internalized Knowledge Anymore?
Yes. True, we have near instant access to any factoid at our fingertips all the time. We can lift a bit of information from the internet, hold on to it for a brief period of time, then shed it.
The problem with this comes when our background knowledge becomes so small that we are less able to engage in analogical thought. We integrate new information into our schema when we connect the unknown with the known:
“The act of making analogies is the great conceptual link between what is known and what is not yet known, but it is a complicated entity in children’s development that is influenced by whatever the environment does or does not provide children.”
–Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home
If acquiring a new understanding is like a small magnet being drawn toward a central magnet (our internalized knowledge), then the smaller our internalized knowledge the less pull it exerts on new information. Put simply, the broader our background knowledge, the easier it is to make connections and develop new understandings.
Wolf describes the quality of our reading as an “index of the quality of our thought.” If deep reading builds complex pathways that facilitate deep thought, then shallow reading can attenuate us to shallow thought.
Wolf uses the phrase “quiet eye” to express the disposition needed for focused, attentive reading. It’s a disposition she fears we are losing:
“I employ ‘quiet eye’ to crystallize both my worries and my hopes for the reader of the 21st century–whose eye will increasingly not stand still; whose mind darts like a nectar-driven hummingbird from one stimulus to another; whose ‘quality of attention’ is slipping imperceptibly with consequences none could have predicted.”
maryanne wolf, Reader, come home
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