Literacy Debate: Online RU Really Reading?

Online reading is really reading, but is it the most challenging reading we do? How do we prepare for a world that requires us to read contracts, policy briefs, legal briefs, descriptions of medicines and side effects, or even the Innaugural address of the President? Does internet reading prepare us for texts that threaten our lives or our livelihood?

“What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the NEA. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

It’s that “sustained, focused, linear attention” that bothers me, because it is so unlike how you read online.  You don’t observe readers lingering on a page when they read online. You see navigation back and forth between sites and searching that carries you across many different sites in a matter of seconds.  If that becomes the model of reading for the next generation, will they have to hire specialists to read the longer texts for them? Will they forget to check the credibility of the sources they read?  Will they ever evaluate the quality of the writing? Will we lose these abilities if we spend most of our reading time in front of a computer?

As an English teacher, I worry about this. But I also think that Mr. Gioia’s definition of reading as “sustained, focused, linear attention” is a little narrow. That might apply to academic reading, but not so much to the many other purposes for reading.

And since when do reading tests assess “sustained, focused, linear attention?  It seems to me the passages on reading tests are not much longer than the reading we do on the internet.  Reading tests have seldom assessed the kind of reading we need to do or enjoy doing.  How can those scores indicate anything about sustained attention?

So I reject the evidence of declining reading, but I continue to worry if the new reading has lost something that the old reading reinforced.  We are really reading online, but are we reading in ways that support disciplined and critical literacy?