WORLD OF LEARNING: DEEP READING

"The Importance of Deep Reading" Maryanne Wolf and Mirit Barzillai/Educational Leadership 3/2009

I just got turned onto this 2009 essay by my sister, but it dovetails with other reading I've been doing, as it focuses on the benefits and drawbacks of the internet, particularly as it relates to reading. I've just started Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. He prepared for the book and opened up discussion of the issue in the much-ballyhooed Atlantic article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

I've also noticed a tangential discussion on social networking and its convenient "shallowness" in Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece, "Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted," and a piece by Damon Darlin in The New York Times, "Keeping Our Distance, the Facebook Way."

I hope these links "encourage deep thought," to quote Wolf and Barzillai, rather than "a more passive and, as Socrates put it, an even more easily 'deluded' reader." The paradox of the internet is that as we try to enrich connections by clicking on links, we may be uncoupling ourselves from real understanding based on critical evaluation of competing sources.