Reading Space: The Long and the Short of It
Nick Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid is still rippling around the web. In it, Carr suggests that jumping around the place and snacking on information is not only inferior to reading longer works, it actually makes us incapable of enjoying them. Hence, Google is making us stupid.
Then, some smart folk over at Britannica.com started trading blows. Foremost, Clay Shirky rose up to defend the web, but he butted up against the united front of Sven Bikerts, David Brin, Larry Sanger, and Carr himself.
Unfortunately, it’s all a bit of a mess to read through. The debate is short on definitions, yet full of whimsical anecdotes, and fails to answer the most important questions. Like: What is reading anyway? What are ‘longer works’? Must they be written on paper pages? What about ‘smaller works’ on paper? And why are these screamingly intelligent people somehow trying to compare Tolstoy with LOLCats?
More importantly, why hasn’t anyone asked Science what it thinks? If you can define what you’re talking about, then you can ask Science, and this is precisely what Kevin Kelly has done. He’s sorted through the mess and tried to come up with a dichotomy for texts, independent of the medium, where ‘cyberspace’ sits on the left, and ‘literature-space’ sits on the right.
Stories are so hardwired into our subconscious that it would not surprise me if we did indeed inhabit a story-space that is different from our web-based reading-space. This is a testable proposition. Do our brains work differently when we are in the middle of a story versus when we are in the middle of web surfing? I would be astounded if they were the same. But if that was all the happened — different strokes for stories than for links, then the solution to exiting the web and entering stories is easy — just read, listen, or watch more stories.
This is a great distinction, but I think we could add a couple of other dimensions to it. The first would be long-form and short-form. There wouldn’t be an easy way to define long and short, so I propose dividing it up on similar lines to a short story versus a long story — length, in other words.
The second dimension I’d explore would be reader input, which categorises the text based on what kind of role the reader played in forming it. For example, let’s say a person has just read 20,000 words in an hour. That could be in a paper book, a PDF, a website; it could be long-form or short-form; it could be fiction or non-fiction. But what if the reader formed the text? They started out in Wikipedia, jumped to a dictionary, stumbled on a PDF white paper, then a blog, then back to Wikipedia. They just read 20,000 words in a single hour on a single topic, but how those words fell after one and another had a high degree of reader input, likely activating (and refining, perhaps) different cognitive abilities.
So, combining these new dimensions with Kelly’s cyberspace versus literature-space dimension, we would be able to plot texts in a three dimensional space. I’m not too sure what cyberspace means in this context anymore, so I’ll simply call it ‘reference-space’. This gives us:
- X-axis: Reference-space versus literature-space — Is it fiction?
- Y-axis: Long-form versus short-form — How long is it?
- Z-axis: High versus low reader input — What role did the reader play in building (not writing) the text?
I’m guessing that each of these dimensions would fire different neurons, and could thus form the basis of an experimental design to test (and compare) the impact of reading specific types of text. For example, someone reading large amounts of short-form, reference-space texts that they’ve actively pulled together would likely be doing something very different than curling up on the lounge reading War and Peace. Both activities are most definitely reading, but I doubt anyone could argue they’re one and the same.
And this then takes us back to the original question — Is Google Making Us Stupid? With some well defined categories for texts (whatever they may be), we can actually answer this question empirically, rather than begrudging the web or romanticizing the texts of dead Russian authors.
* There are a few things I’ve intentionally ignored here, as I want to focus solely on reading words. The first is audio books, which I think would be another experiment altogether. The second is distraction, resulting from the reading space being filled with podcasts, advertising, YouTube clips, and other pieces of non-textual clutter.
