If I hadn’t given up regular TV watching about 20 years ago, I’d probably still be channel-surfing into oblivion. You’ve been there, right? Whatever you’re watching can’t possibly be as good or important as whatever you’re missing. With hundreds of available channels, this is just mathematically reasonable in a very frustrating way. Maybe, but it’s also an example of how technological access to more can make a person so distracted that he winds up investing time in nothing. Thankfully, on-demand options for home viewing of filmed media have obviated the need for me ever to channel-surf, but then the Internet and social media came along and brought a whole new ADD-like experience to our lives.
Enter the Facebook feed and Tweetdecks and all those stories of great interest shared by people you love, trust, admire, etc. There’s no way any of us is reading all of those stories unless we have nothing else to do, so do we pick and choose among them? Or do we just gloss over nearly all of it? And is all this glossing — my friend calls it “gisting” — better than ignoring the apparently substantive content altogether and sticking to a favored news source. Is skimming over fragments of stories actually changing our brains? According to cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, all this gisting may be harming our ability to engage in what she calls “deep reading.”
In this interview, Wolf talks to Robin Young, co-host of the NPR program Here & Now. To quote:
YOUNG: You had a great line. You said TV produced soundbite culture; online reading is producing eyebite culture.
WOLF: Yes, I’m afraid that what we’re becoming is so inured to seizing the most salient word that we are literally eliminating the music, the thoughts in between those words, some of the most precious aspects of written language.
Wolf wonders if we are not evolving what Young summarizes in her intro as “digital brains.” And I think this is more than just a generic term for our times, but is rather an appropriate reference for precisely what Dr. Wolf feels may be lost if what we’re witnessing is really a stage in evolution.
If you think about what any audiophile will tell you is wrong with digital music, it’s that all sorts of nuance no longer exists for the contemporary listener to a typical MP3, for example. Overtones, undertones, and various other sounds are far too subtle to be captured by mass-production, digital sampling; and in a very similar way it seems to me, Wolf is concerned that our own habit of sampling disparate text might make us deaf to the music of written language or at least impatient with it. Wolf describes her own experience after a period of 5 to 8 hours of screen-reading per day and being unable to return to a favored novel by Herman Hesse. She states that it took two weeks of purposeful effort to reform those temporarily dormant connections in her brain.
Wolf is less concerned with adults than with children who have yet to build that neurological foundation, which enables us not only to engage with richer texts, but even to enjoy them. To hear the whole symphony, if you will. She is quick to say that she does not advocate turning back the clock and cutting kids off from technology. “We have to equip our children with 21st-century skills. But at the same time, we must know how to form those reading circuits that allow what I call deep reading. It takes years to form in a child, and it takes milliseconds in us to use. And those milliseconds don’t just come naturally; we have to learn to use them.”
Thanks for the article, i believe i got the gist of it 🙂
While gisting your article I realized you misspelled a word. “Neoroloical” in this last paragraph.
Thank you. On the subject of gisting, proofreading on a screen remains a siren’s call.
Great article, I concur. I’m frequenting local library as it won’t exist in a couple years..
Well Put!
I don’t want to inflame the audiophiles out there, and I also realize that MP3s are a big part of the economic file sharing disaster, but I humbly submit that it is the CONTENT of the music that is in comparative decline. Another point: MP3s and other formats are, of course, full length temporally. Therefore, MP3s are not damaging our attention span. Let us not commingle our concerns irrationally. I must add that for many of us, decent quality MP3s play well enough, nuances and all.
What is more lacking is video that lingers on one perspective long enough for us to comprehend the dance moves, the band’s delivery, or whatever we are watching. The constant ‘hip’ cuts from angle to angle and zoom to zoom are NOT hip, and do not substitute for competence or substance. Spielberg’s cinema work TELLS a story. Modern video BECOMES the story, in a most unflattering way. But I doubt it is ‘causing’ ADD. We may have a society in which long term gratifications are so hard to achieve that the many choose to deny the ills of life by pretending to make a feature out of the bug of living today. What a way to identify with their oppressors!
The lie that illegal file sharing is destroying the industry continues. The MP3 and the Internet destroyed the industry’s pricing model, which was based on bundling a hit single with 9-10 inconsequential pieces of junk and selling the whole package at an inflated price. The industry’s rapid growth in the 1960s coincided with the invention of the 33 1/3 RPM LP–the industry’s first bundled format–and was extended by the invention of the CD in the 1980s. The mp3 and the internet brought per-song distribution, and that’s what finished the industry off, not piracy; absent the bundle, there was no way to inflate the price of the product to pre-mp3 levels, and the industry had to shrink. Let’s not forget also that by the early 2000s the industry was utterly despised by customer and artists alike, which means that no one cared to take up their cause when history kicked in.
Whether the current situation is better or worse for musicians is debatable. That it’s worse for the RIAA, there can be no doubt. In 2001, a handful of artists accounted for 95% of record sales worldwide. The sales are smaller now in terms of both volume and revenue per sale, and the concentration of sales is every bit as dramatic as it was 12 years ago. I don’t think anyone would argue that artists are well-served by record companies now, but a return to 1995 isn’t the answer.
Richard, I’m not sure how your comment relates to the neuroscience post; perhaps you meant to respond to the newer post about piracy. That said, I maintain that it’s a mistake to confuse criticism of piracy with criticism of the music industry — past, present, or future. They are, I believe, distinct subjects usually conflated by people seeking to rationalize their behavior. In the simplest terms, piracy is a non-market — a black market — it is not business by any definition unless you’re in Russia, where corruption is the norm. The music industry is real business that, like any other industry, is subject to the best and worst intentions of the people in it. Sure, record labels have pumped out plenty of dross, but what does that have to do, say, with a singer/songwriter who produces solid work and has a generally sound relationship with his/her label? It’s easy to generalize and point to a bunch of pop stuff you think was crap, but I don’t remember feeling cheated paying $14 for a CD by Dire Straits or U2, for example. If it’s a good album, that’s about $1.40 per song in the 1990s. And now people are saying $1.29 per song with zero risk is too much to pay? Seriously?
You’re cynical about “bundling,” but you leave out the creative phenomenon of the album. In the 50s and early 60s, singles were the thing. Then, we got albums, the best of which were carefully crafted as whole pieces thematically tied together. They encouraged I think a deeper relationship with the artists who produced the work. Now, we’re back to singles, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing (though in this sense we are back in 1955); it’s just what is, and it’s changing the way artists produce. Unfortunately, the hit single is again king at a time when everything has a half-life somewhere between a blink and a mouse click. So, we’ve got short-attention-span-theater, the economic demand to hit fast and big before disappearing, and a general devaluation of works by consumers who consider free media a civil right. It seems to me this is a great climate for Lady Gaga and Doritos to team up like they did at SXSW 2014 but not so good for the independent label and its slate of unique artists.
Ain’t all this the truth!
I think what point you are making is the ability of “deep listening”.
Skim the sounds on the radio, TV and hit singles and with their same-sounds they feel emotionally flat.
Unique artist with real sounds abound as they tap their own epigenetics, allowing us the glimpse of the power within our own spirits.
But to mainstream media one simply falls into a pit of monotones and the fading death of soulless animation.
Regardless its nice to know that other folks like you think similarly to myself. May we continue to rock on forever!
My regular TV watching ended around the same time as yours did David.
The last series I remember watching with interest was “Spencer For Hire”.
Not only was it satisfying on a sensual level, what with the action, scenery and noise of an alive city and surrounding New England area, it also provided small morality plays with each plot.
I agree with your neuroscientist guest that “all this gisting may be harming our ability to engage in deep reading.” However, I fear that this is hitting just the tip of our psyche iceberg.
My sense is that there is a tendency for folks to think that there is a scientific or technological answer for everything.
Spirituality, not in a religious sense, but from a fundamental being concept appears to have lost it’s context in today’s world.
It is far too easy to observe the world of our five senses than it is to attempt to delve deep inside our souls to find out what makes the world tick.
Perhaps we should be considering just how many tocks we have left. After all, the Fermi Paradox surmises that there should be an abundance of extraterrestrial civilizations out there in the universe and yet we have no evidence of coming in contact with them. Why is that?
Perhaps these “advanced civilizations” destroyed themselves.
Perhaps intelligence isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Perhaps intelligence without a balance of spiritual wisdom is far more dangerous than we anticipated.
Perhaps it is time to wake up people… from the inside out.
Peace.
Spoken not from a scholarly point of view, rather from a spiritual one, don’t you think?
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So gald they have the option to share this article to facebook XD