Author Archives: Chrislande Dorcilus

“Your paper brain and your Kindle brain aren’t the same thing”

PRI has this great story/article on the way we navigate different modes of media when we read digitally vs. when we read on paper. My favorite quote from the article (which includes the link to the whole thing):  “If you don’t use the deep reading part of your brain. You lose the deep reading part of your brain.” 

Excerpt:

” “The problem is that many of us have adapted to reading online just too well. And if you don’t use the deep reading part of your brain, you lose the deep reading part of your brain.”

So what’s deep reading? It’s the concentrated kind we do when we want to “immerse ourselves in a novel or read a mortgage document,” Zoromodi says. And that uses the kind of long-established linear reading you don’t typically do on a computer. “Dense text that we really want to understand requires deep reading, and on the internet we don’t do that.”

Linear reading and digital distractions have caught the attention of academics like Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University.

“I don’t worry that we’ll become dumb because of the Internet,” Wolf says, “but I worry we will not use our most preciously acquired deep reading processes because we’re just given too much stimulation. That’s, I think, the nub of the problem.””

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Slate: Pew Study Says that Millennials are Actually Well Read Library Users

This article is related to the discussion of Crisis/feigning Crisis and it’s effect of the American educational system…The Pew study is revealing it’s fabrication, but I think educational companies will use this to sell more of it’s new media services.

The article makes me think of the “generational divide” that Losh mentioned, it’s relation to a technological divide, and how millennials–who, I am guessing, makes up a few of us in the New Media Literacies class–relate to their older/younger peers/students in the classroom/any learning environment. Is there a dynamic that we should explore?

Anyways, let me stop rambling.

Quote from the article:

“What’s more, libraries are not a cherished refuge of the old, but a destination for the young: In a September 2013 survey, 50 percent of respondents between the ages of 16 and 29 had used a library in the past year, compared with 47 percent of their older counterparts, and 36 percent of people under 30 had used a library website in that same time frame; compared with 28 percent of the over-30s…”

Read the Slate article. Read the actual study.

Tell me what y’all think,

 

Chrislande

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