Reading,Writing and Critical Thought

            Have been reading a book by Maryanne Wolf, professor at Tufts University, titled   “Reader, Come Home- The Reading Brain in a Digital World” in which she analyzes the effects of new technology on the brain. Her fellow professors of literature and social science have noticed two trends at the college level:

            “The first is that students have become increasingly less patient with the time it takes to understand the syntactically demanding sentence structures in denser texts and increasingly adverse to the effort needed to go deeper into their analysis. The second is that student writing is deteriorating”

              Cursive writing is no longer taught in some states and only partially in others, which means that many people will not be able to read the American Declaration of Independence or Constitution as they were originally written. My thirty five years of cursive journals might be incomprehensible to my own granddaughter and other descendants. Maybe translation software will make cursive legible to future generations, just as Latin and other lost languages remain viable, but even when they can be read, intricate works of literature might be incomprehensible to future generations if the lack of attention span and critical analysis continues.           

            As a person who has spent many years walking and thinking in solitude, it is not difficult for me to discern the lack of critical analyisis in otherwise intelligent people. The proliferation of biased news sources and the manipulation of video and print to promote propaganda has made the immersion in self fulfilling ‘group think’ easier than ever. It is impossible to articulate the complexity of a subject in a ‘tweet’, but that seems to be the extent of some peoples critical thinking. If they limit their sources of information to others who think like them, they will never find the truth.

             Fortunately, there are always independent thinkers who challenge the culture. If the digital age lowers peoples ability to think deeply, then I suppose we cannot invent Artificial Intelligence soon enough for it to pick up the slack. I cautiously trust that humanity will adapt as needed to compensate.