How do we read now? And what does this mean for writers?

by Carla Douglas
@CarlaJDouglas

Image by Rob_Mac (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The fact is that for those of us involved in … any of the knowledge-intensive industries, the flow of information is like a strong and steady wind. We put up our net to capture what we can, but what passes by, the swarm of butterflies, greatly exceeds what we can bring to our own attention.

—Joseph Esposito, in The Scholarly Kitchen, What Is Summer Reading but Life Writ Large?   

By now, we all know this, don’t we? But Esposito says it so elegantly that we can actually see ourselves stepping out again into the storm, net up, head down, unsure, really, what we’re hoping to snag, but certain it will be something we need.

Something we can bring to our attention, he points out – not even to ponder or to process – but simply to hold in our gaze until the next shiny object comes into view. It’s both depressing and tantalizing to know how much we don’t know but to keep chasing it anyway.

There’s now plenty of evidence to show that how we read has changed. Digital snacking, info-snacking, information foraging, grazing, skimming, scanning, harvesting – these are the new synonyms for reading. The close reading we’ve practiced in the past to engage with longer texts like novels, plays and essays has been replaced with what N. Katherine Hayles in How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine calls “hyper reading” – the online flitting about that we all recognize as our new reading style.

Hayles points out that hyper reading isn’t new – scholars have needed this skill to move through volumes of material very quickly to find relevant passages. This kind of reading is, however, becoming the norm, and brings with it the concern that younger readers have not developed and may never develop the deep and close reading skills necessary to sustain focused attention on longer pieces of work. And without these skills, they lack the ability to make meaning from a text.

In her book Proust and the Squid, cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf studies the reading brain, and similarly observes that the kind of reading we do in the 21^st century fails to engage us in the deep, contemplative analysis that close reading does. As one reviewer notes, texts are “skimmed and filleted, cherry-picked for half-grasped truths.” Wolf is also concerned about how young readers engage with text and believes they might never enjoy that “gift of time” that we experience through close reading.

For now, however, this constant, fragmented skimming and scanning for information is how we read. And if this is how we read, how, then, should we write?

Next week: Part 2 — What this means if you are a writer.

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