Like Professor Greenfield, my research group and I are most concerned with how the acquisition of new capacities changes human development. In the case of reading, we know that the "expert reading brain" as we know it includes a beautifully complex circuit that integrates simpler decoding skills with what I call "deep reading" processes such as critical analysis, analogical thought, inference and insight.Maybe. But I've always thought that computers, especially computer games for example, certainly had to develop some new skills in kids today - hand-eye coordination at least, but also a sense of strategy. You just can't play some of these games without thinking, a lot (I'm serious, check out some of these games, they're major strategy games, and many require a lot of forethought).
The integration of the simpler and the deeper reading processes is not automatic and requires years of learning by the novice reader, as well as extra milliseconds for any expert to read a more sophisticated text. The reality is that today's expert reading circuit was formed under very different conditions and with different mediums than those of our childrens'.
The questions that our society must ask revolve around whether the time-consuming demands of the deep-reading processes will be lost in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, multitasking, and processing the next and the next piece of information. Will an immersion in digitally-dominated forms of reading change the capacity of the young readers to form and to develop their deep reading processes? No one at this moment possesses the evidence to answer these questions, but our children's development and our species' intellectual evolution require that we confront them.
As for the speed reading we all do on sites, yes it's different than reading a book, but again, if we all agree that reading is good, is it not possible that quickly reading a lot of stuff, from a lot of different sources, might not tax your mind in a different, but equal, manner? You clearly have to think if you're jumping around that quickly - and think quickly - and you have to organize in your brain all that you've read, and keep track of it. And while we can't always keep track of it - good luck remembering what Web site you read any particular article from last week (you remember the article, but likely not the source) - again, I'm not entirely convinced that the digital revolution somehow worsens our analytical powers.
Hell, Thorg probably told Grunt 40,000 years ago that drawing all those pictures on the cave wall was going to make him go blind.
