IN last Tuesday’s editorial, we made a case for the necessity of newspapers in a world where more and more people are increasingly getting their news from various sources on the Internet.
It turns out, however, that we can lose something more than credibility, printing costs and a traditional business model when newspapers focus exclusively on the digital delivery of news via the Web or mobile devices—when a newspaper no longer prints its product, to put it simply.
Certain findings featured in the banner story of our Science section on Sunday—“Deep reading: An endangered human activity,” written by Stephanie Tumampos—suggest that reading in the online-only environment may not be necessarily good for us, that it alters not just consumption but cognitive patterns—how our brain works, in short.
Tumampos had interviewed cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf at the Falling Walls Conference in Berlin, during the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9.
In the BusinessMirror article based on said interview, Wolf warned that people might be losing the ability to read critically in the digital age.
The following are just some of the noteworthy excerpts from the Science feature of Tumampos:
- Wolf emphasized that reading is not just what one reads, but how one reads as well, because “literacy changes your brain, it changes the brain of a society and, ultimately, it changes our species.”
- Wolf said screen reading “short circuits reading” and “does not give time for inference, analogy, empathy, critical analysis and insight.”
- Wolf explained that the problem with technology “is that we regress to a very basic form of reading rather than use the entirety of this very sophisticated network.” (referring to the human brain)
- She noted that “reading on a screen where it is transitory” causes one to move faster, making the habit become skimming. “When you skim, you are giving this basic circuit [the brain] a lot of information, you get fast and then you move on, and then the screen hastens you along but you don’t give the deeper processes time to work. So the technology is not the problem. The problem is that our circuit reflects the characteristics of the technology,” she said.
- Many people—especially children—have become reliant on technology. “The reality among our children is that they are often distracted 27 times per hour. Now, if you think about the circuit and the attention that you need to concentrate, it makes memory and consolidation of what we’re learning almost impossible,” Wolf said.
- Kids understand better when reading from print. In a study mentioned in Wolf’s book titled, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, she mentioned a study from 2000 and 2017, which involved 171,000 young people from all over the world who were given the same task—to read the same story but in different mediums, print and screen. The research showed that children who read through print understood the context better than those who read on screen.
- Empathy is also formed through deep reading, as shown by a research at the Max Planck Institute by Tania Singer, which Wolf also noted.
- Wolf said that if people become ever more surface skimmers, “we will be literally susceptible to fake news, false news, false fears and demagogues. There is a direct connection between a skimming population who isn’t thinking about what they’re reading and their inability to judge truth and, therefore, [are unable to] choose their leaders wisely.”
We may be reading more than ever in this digital age, when all kinds of information are available and accessible through the Internet, but Wolfe made excellent points that reading exclusively from the screens of our cell phones, tablets, computers, and other devices may not be all that beneficial after all.
We do hope you read this editorial, preferably in our print edition. Better yet, we hope you read the entire Science feature.
Image credits: jimbo Albano