Proust, the Squid, Reading, and Computers

A few weeks ago I heard an NPR broadcast of the show " On Point" that I thought would be, well, on point for this class. The topic was "the reading mind" and was a conversation on reading, how it works, what it does to our brain, its socio-cultural history, and (inevitably) what the digital era is doing to reading and literacy. The guests were:

• Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development at Tufts University and author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain"
• Constance Steinkuehler, professor of educational communication and technology, University o Wisconsin at Madison
• Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor of the Atlantic Monthly

Wolf basically celebrates reading and sees a devolution of it in the digital age; Steinkuehler argues that much of digital culture is text-based and requires/demands a lot of reading and interaction with text, but the forms of reading may be changing (i.e. maybe children read fewer linear narratives, but they are reading more in general); Beatty is there as mediator and commentator.

It was a great show and really got me thinking about what we mean when we talk about "reading" (funny, kind of like "What we talk about when we talk about sex"). Anyhow, I was brought face-to-face with my own assumptions about reading--"to read," especially when we talk about children reading, means (to me) to read a book, usually fiction, though non-fiction is great. When I think of "reading" I somehow don't include the reading the back of the shampoo bottle I do while I am in the shower, or the flipping through magazines at the grocery checkout, or the reading of instructions on how to put together yet one more children's toy. And yet, these are all acts of reading, they all require the skill of reading and interpretation. So why don't I think of that or let it "count" when the conversation comes around to "our are children reading?" Steinkuehler makes some great points about our assumptions surrounding reading and the ways in which we have hierarchies of value about types of reading. I have a strong attachment to narrative form, and yet I consider comic books ("graphic novels" being the preferred current descriptor) to be reading. And when I think about it, I consider the reading required for most Web activities to be reading. But I don't think reading someone's Facebook entries or MySpace anecdotes to be the same thing as reading a novel. And I don't think reading a textbook is the same as reading a novel, nor do I think reading a magazine is the same as reading a novel. Yet these are all acts of reading and, according to Wolf, all act on and shape the brain. So who has the problem here, me or the people (kids) doing all this other reading? and is my problem with the fact that reading a novel seems "pure" (as in I read for the sake of reading, for discovery and for pleasure) whereas reading Facebook entries is reading for "purpose" (as in reading to find something out)? Maybe I used to think this way, but I have found myself to be a HUGE fans of "Mommy blogs" and have discovered some of the very best essayistic, humorous, and astute reading of my life (seriously) in some of these blogs. And yet, and yet . . . I would still put reading a novel above reading blogs. What is *up* with that?? WTF? I am either more conservative than I like to think, or I really have internalized this value system about reading.

So then, while I am thinking this jumble of thoughts inspired by this program, I read an excerpt of the book:

Thus the reading brain is part of highly successful two-way dynamics. Reading can be learned only because of the brain's plastic design, and when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually. For example, at the neuronal level, a person who learns to read in Chinese uses a very particular set of neuronal connections that differ in significant ways from the pathways used in reading English. When Chinese readers first try to read in English, their brains attempt to use Chinese-based neuronal pathways. The act of learning to read Chinese characters has literally shaped the Chinese reading brain. Similarly, much of how we think and what we think about is based on insights and associations generated from what we read. As the author Joseph Epstein put it, "A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read."

And this gets me going on a whole new train of thought about the connection between bi-lingualism and learning and orality--I was raised with a non-native speaking mother in another country (not her native country) so I was always surrounded by different languages and learned to speak them fairly well (fluent up to a certain level of formality and intellectual expression). But I never really read in these languages (except, of course, for comic books, which brings us back to what it means to talk about "reading")). But certainly speaking the language and participating in that language's oral and visual culture made it possible for me to read passably in it--which according to the quote above means that my brain made different pathways, which physically linked reading and language acquisition in a different way. Which makes us have to think about all the efforts to stop bi-lingual education that are presented as "helping" the bi-lingual student. . .

And, finally, the broadcast got me to thinking about metaphor and analogy--not only the provocative title of Wolf's book, but the language in which the topic was discussed. For example, here is an excerpt from her book:
Interwoven through the book's three parts is a particular view of how the brain learns anything new. There are few more powerful mirrors of the human brain's astonishing ability to rearrange itself to learn a new intellectual function than the act of reading. Underlying the brain's ability to learn reading lies its protean capacity to make new connections among structures and circuits originally devoted to other more basic brain processes that have enjoyed a longer existence in human evolution, such as vision and spoken language. We now know that groups of neurons create new connections and pathways among themselves every time we acquire a new skill. Computer scientists use the term "open architecture" to describe a system that is versatile enough to change—or rearrange—to accommodate the varying demands on it. Within the constraints of our genetic legacy, our brain presents a beautiful example of open architecture. Thanks to this design, we come into the world programmed with the capacity to change what is given to us by nature, so that we can go beyond it. We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs.

I am really struck that Wolf, arguing about the importance of reading and a certain form of literacy, someone who is not convinced that there is value in reading in the digital form, evokes the computer and computer science to talk about what reading does to the brain. It is not directly related to media literacy, but it made me think about the ways in which computers have given us a brand new language not just in terms of the content and the technology and the lingo that comes with them, but in terms of metaphor and the ways in which we imagine our bodies and selves. Which in this case is being used, un-self-consciously I think, to talk about and imagine an act of engagement with text that the author wants us to think can only happen in certain forms exclusive of what we are getting in the digital age.

Of course, I have not read Wolf's book and have not re-listened to the broadcast, so who knows if I am representing her fairly. But I thought it was a very interesting way to spend an hour, especially at the end of the semester.