Emerging Media Thoughts

There has been a great deal of “buzz” lately, centered around a recently published psychology survey which indicates that multitaskers might not be as good at multitasking as they think. While the details of the study are far more complicated and nuanced than the popular media reports, the theme here is a consistent one: divided intelligence does not make one smarter or more productive in fact perhaps the reverse. Or as Nicholas Carr argues in his no famous Atlantic Monthly article, Is Google Making us Stupid?:

my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Now there is a lot to think about both in Carr’s argument and in this recent study, particularly about the way that technology shapes/reshapes the way we think, but what concerns me in both pieces is the assumption that there is a “natural” way to read or process. Carr says, “the deep reading that used to come naturally.” Of course this reading was not natural, anything but. Presumably Carr had to learn to “deep read” through years of practice. Now, I’m not saying that deep reading is bad, or that we shouldn’t do it, anything but. Deep reading has its advantages, but it also has its limits, same goes for scanning. But to treat one as natural and the other as unnatural is to privilege one at the expense of the other, rather than analyzing each on its own terms. Deep reading is a historically developed reading practice, not an intrinsic naturally good method of knowledge acquisition, one which might have to be adapted to manage the changing media landscape.