What is reading?

Don't laugh, because the question is not as simple as it might appear. If you've read the last two sentences, did you actually "read" in the traditional sense of the word? The reason I ask is that I've heard talk radio debates pitting "the Internet" against "reading" -- the argument being that you should get your kid offline and force him to read books.

Naturally, the logician in me screamed silently (but fiercely enough to get it past my memory-erasing editor) that "there is no logical difference between text online and the same text in a book!"

Really?

While it might be true in the technical and logical sense that there is no difference in the meaning of the words, I found myself playing Devil's advocate and wondering whether there might be something more than logic going on. Maybe even something more than the question of whether the words are true.

But right there, as I realized yesterday, evaluating the logic or truthfulness of words means nothing to a blogger unless the words can be cited accurately and sourced online. So, when I wanted to quote from Herb Cohen's Negotiate This!, I was forced to locate a link to the very page I was quoting. Otherwise, readers would have to take it on faith that the author said what he said about de Tocqueville, and that would be less persuasive.

But suppose the same author had written the same thing about de Tocqueville online. Isn't the insight just as valuable whether it is in electronic form or on a page in a book? For my purposes, obviously it is more valuable online; otherwise I cannot cite or quote it. In blogging, the unfortunate rule tends to be that if it can't be found on the Internet, it doesn't exist. Anyway, I put the words in my blog, with a link to the page, and there they are.

To continue playing Devil's Advocate, what about the effect on the brain? Nowadays when I find myself reading a book late at night, a strange thing happens as I drift off to sleep. The text starts to come to life electronically, and sometimes I find myself attempting to scroll here, to highlight a passage there, and once I even decided that I wanted to copy a couple of paragraphs of text, and lift it out... This means it's time to put the book down and turn off the light.

After all, it's only a book, and books don't come to life as electronic text does.

Might this appearance of life -- this animation, if you will -- be the crucial difference? Does being steeped in that quasi-living variety of text do anything to the brain that might cause the text to be processed differently?

Considering that many billions of dollars are involved, I'm sure studies have been done. It would be an easy thing to determine whether different areas of the brain would be activated by reading a passage online or reading it in a book.

Without having researched any such scientific findings, I will say this:if people react differently to the same the same words, facts, ideas, and arguments, they are not being logical! (I don't want yet another reason to be frustrated by the animalistic human brain, but if this scenario is possible, I'd be dishonest not to face it.)

At the Marshall McCluhan Studies Advisory Board's web site, I was a bit disturbed to read this:

1.Radiant light and reading are mutually exclusive: As the Emerys and other investigators have shown, the neurophysiological evidence is overwhelmingly clear that VDT use for extensive reading carries the virtual certainty of deleterious health effects. Simply put: radiant light (as contrasted with reflected light, that is, cathode ray technology CRT) draws energy away from the verbal centre and sets up strong stress patterns for anyone trying to use a VDT for literate purposes. Print is going to have to stay on the printed page where it can best enhance our re-entry into the acoutic space of electromagnetic wave resonance. It is easy to see that as movies become enslaved to moronic visual production values,sound track technology has grown impressively.

...[I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent.

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. It is easy to perceive signs of such panic in Jacques Barzun who manifests himself as a fearless and ferocious Luddite in his The House of the Intellect. Sensing that all he holds dear stems from the operation of the alphabet on and through our minds, he proposes the abolition of all modern art, science, and philanthropy. This trio extirpated, he feels we can slap down the lid on Pandora's box. At least Barzun localizes his problem even if he has no clue as to the kind of agency exerted by these forms. Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

I'm even more fascinated by the second omission, from the paragraph directly following "Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time" :

Reverting to the earlier theme of conformity, Carothers continues (pp. 315-316): "Thought and behavior are not seen as separate; they are both seen as behavioral. Evil-willing is, after all the most fearful type of "behavior" known in many of these societies, and a dormant or awakening fear of it lies ever in the minds of their members." In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

Hate speech laws, anyone? (No wonder that was scrubbed. Wouldn't want people to worry that electronic words might trigger a resurgence of primitivism, would we?)

I find all of this very disturbing, because the optimist in me likes to think that people will at least try to be logical and rational, and that the written word -- which has for better or for worse now come to life online -- will continue to be an invaluable tool. The idea that some people can't handle it is bad enough, but that they might use violent force to turn it off is really scary.

Anyway, there are still books, and they still contain words which (so I stubbornly insist) ought to be the same whether they are printed and bound, viewed online, or viewed in one of those new fangled devices I don't yet have.

Oh, yes, the Kindle! Ann Althouse described it as "shockingly cool," but when she got one she didn't like it. Didn't smell right, didn't feel right, and above all,

I want contrast: black letters on a white background. I want that in a book, and I want that in a computer screen, and of course, I want that in an electronic book. I want easy to read. I don't want to read ugly gray-on-gray print. Get it?

(Boldness in original, with uncharacteristically large letters.)

While I'd get a kick out of evaluating one, I really don't need a Kindle. But I guess when the power fails, the Kindle probably beats having to use a candle. (Until the battery runs out, that is.)

What I want to know is whether electronic words have a different effect on a different part of the brain, and whether this in turn affects or alters the human logical process.

I do not doubt that there are highly interested people with a lot of money and power behind them who know. Or think they know.

But can I trust them?

MORE: A recent book -- "The Dumbest Generation" by Mark Bauerlein -- is reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. Excerpt:

What frustrates Mr. Bauerlein is not these deficits themselves - it's the way a blind celebration of youth, and an ill-informed optimism about technology, have led the public to ignore them. "Over and over," he writes, "commentators stress the mental advance, the learning side over the fun and fantasy side." Steven Johnson, in his best-selling "Everything Bad Is Good for You," describes videogames as "a kind of cognitive workout." Jonathan Fanton of the MacArthur Foundation writes that children have created "communities the size of nations" where they explore "new techniques for personal expression." Such assessments, Mr. Bauerlein argues, are far too charitable.

Mr. Bauerlein contrasts such "evidence-lite enthusiasm" for digital technologies with a weightier learning tradition. He eulogizes New York's City College in the mid-20th century, a book-centered, debate-fostering place where a generation of intellectuals rejected the "sovereignty of youth" in favor of the concerted study of canonical texts and big ideas.

Is there any way of recovering this lost world? Probably not. But the future may be brighter than Mr. Bauerlein allows....