How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine

The author is professor and director of graduate studies in the literature program at Duke University. A version of the article was presented at the 2010 ADE Summer Seminar East in Adelphi, Maryland. THE evidence is mounting: people in general, and young people in particular, are doing more screen reading of digital materials than ever before. Meanwhile, the reading of print books and of literary genres (novels, plays, and poems) has been declining over the last twenty years. Worse, reading skills (as measured by the ability to identify themes, draw inferences, etc.) have been declining in junior high, high school, college, and even graduate schools for the same period. Two flagship reports from the National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk, reporting the results of their own surveys, and To Read or Not to Read, drawing together other largescale surveys, show that over a wide range of datagathering instruments the results are consistent: people read less print, and they read print less well. This leads the NEA chairman, Dana Gioia, to suggest that the correlation between decreased literary reading and poorer reading ability is indeed a causal connection. The NEA argues (and I of course agree) that literary reading is a good in itself, insofar as it opens the portals of a rich literary heritage (see Griswold, McDonnell, and Wright for the continued high cultural value placed on reading). When decreased print reading, already a cultural concern, is linked with reading problems, it carries a double whammy. Fortunately, the news is not all bad. A newer NEA report, Reading on the Rise, shows for the first time in more than two decades an uptick in novel reading (but not plays or poems), including among the digitally native young adult cohort (ages 18–24). The uptick may be a result of the Big Read initiative by the NEA and similar programs by other organizations; whatever the reason, it shows that print can still be an alluring medium. At the same time, reading scores among fourth and eighth graders remain flat, despite the No Child Left Behind initiative. Notwithstanding the complexities of the national picture, it seems clear that a critical nexus occurs in the juncture of digital reading (exponentially increasing among all but the oldest cohort) and print reading (downward trending with a slight uptick recently). The crucial questions are these: how to convert the increased digital reading into increased reading ability and how to make effective bridges between digital reading and the literacy traditionally associated with print. Mark Bauerlein (a consultant on the Reading at Risk report), in the offensively titled The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, makes no apology for linking the decline of reading skills directly to a decrease in print reading, issuing a stinging indictment to teachers, professors, and other mentors who think digital reading might encourage skills of its own. Not only is there no transfer between digital reading and print reading skills in his view, but digital reading does not even lead to strong digital reading skills (93–111). I found The Dumbest Generation intriguing and infuriating in equal measure. The book is valuable for its synthesis of a great deal of empirical evidence, going well beyond the 2009 NEA report in this regard; it is infuriating in its tendentious refusal How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine