“Distractions such as texting and simultaneous things to do on the screen will ensure that no deep reading takes place,” Stanovich said in an e-mail. “That’s why book reading is best for what Wolf calls deep reading. The idea that children looking at screens are taking in, at a deep level, information from many different streams is a falsehood.”
So what about computer games, which have been shown to increase IQ? According to Greenfield, they can boost IQ, but not knowledge. “Information processing is not knowledge,” she said during a presentation at Britain’s Hay Festival last summer.
Greenfield has drawn criticism from fellow scientists for linking the rise of autism to the spread of the Internet. But at Hay, she speculated that a recent threefold increase in prescriptions of the drug Ritalin to treat hyperactivity could “just possibly be due to the fact that you’re placing a young brain in an environment that mandates a short attention span. Because that’s what screens do.”
The question of what can be done to combat them is equally fraught. “No cry for the vigilance of the species is going to do a single bit of good,” Wolf acknowledges. Going back to print is not a solution. “The world is digital already.”
Her solution is to join the famous Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to help design a tablet computer to teach children reading skills “If I can’t ask society to stop and examine before it lurches, then I must enter the mouth of the medium to make sure the medium itself is used to correct its flaws,” she says.
In the meantime, she worries, huge monuments of human culture threaten to disappear from consciousness. The “demise” of 19th- and early 20th-century literature is continuing, according to Wolf, who says she has been overwhelmed by mail from educators confirming her fears. “They’re all talking about how their students don’t have the patience any more,” she says.
So goodbye George Eliot, Henry James, et al.
“Syntax is a reflection of the convolution of thought,” says Wolf, who studied literature before turning to linguistics and studying under Noam Chomsky. “As we become too impatient to read complicated syntax, I wonder out loud about the capacity for handling the complexity of issues that are out there in life, with all their semicolons.”
