The Deep Reader

 I found the article, "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?", written by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic to be an interesting read.  I found many of his assertions such as that we have become increasingly impatient in thoroughly reading a text to be quite poignant and agreeable.  When I think about my own reading habits, with both physical texts and the internet, I do indeed feel a need to rush through what I am reading.  To get the "gist" of what the authors are trying to say rather than making my own "rich mental connections" about the content.  Heck, I'm even wondering now if I gave a proper "deep reading" to Carr's article and truly understood what he was trying to explain, in which he had warned that "deep reading" into a text is a skill we are losing to the internet since finding the meaning of a text interpreted by someone else is just a click away.  This is a behaviour that I am sure many students, particularly post-secondary students, share as they may simply want to get assignments related to a text completed as soon as possible without fully grasping the material they are going through and understanding the nuance authors try to convey in their arguments and explanations.  The internet does help magnify this behaviour as complex information is usually compressed into simpler phrases for a quick but basic understanding and provides many links to keep us engaged in a swiftly moving torrent of data without taking a moment to stop and think about what we are reading.

Focusing on one of his assertions, Carr notes that the ease of access to information the internet provides has turned people away from swimming in a "sea of words" to mere skimmers of information who have a basic but not a deep understanding of anything.  While this may be anecdotal to my own experience, being a skimmer seems to be a habit that has been a growing trend even before the internet likely spoiled me rotten with its vast but concise amounts of information for easy consumption.  Looking back to writing EQAO in Grades 3 and 6, the reading and writing sections of the test instructed students to fully read the provided text before answering the questions.  An admirable trait to push on students as fully reading a text will allow a student to give the most comprehensive answer to a question.  However, I naturally found it more efficient to simply read the questions first and then find the key words in the texts as there was an element of pressure to finish quickly.  I believe that this was a habit even my teachers also tried to push to keep things in timely manner.  This habit has ultimately extended into other tests or assignments that follow a similar format of reading a text first before answering some questions on it.  Thereby, it seems that while the internet has seemingly turned us into skimmers of information looking for an easy read to consume, it does not seem to be a trait that is solely exclusive to the internet's influence.

So what to do then in making sure students are able to deeply comprehend what they are reading in any format? What can be done, particularly for students who are growing up with the internet and technology that has become a constant presence in their lives?  A return to tradition of simply buckling down and reading a text thoroughly without the internet's assistance is unlikely to pan out well or even be acceptable to newer generations of students.  Solely relying on the internet and technology is also unlikely to create deep readers either.  Ultimately, in my opinion, aspiring and current educators should find ways to intertwine both approaches.  The internet and technology is not going away any time in the future.  In fact, both are more likely to grow their influence over humanity as time goes on.  Therefore, the old practices of deeply reading a text, to create our own original thoughts and interpretations, should be adapted to fit the medium of our time.  Students should be asked to consider and think critically of what someone wrote on the internet.  This already has significant connections to media literacy component in the Language Arts curriculum.  By adapting deep reading, we make sure the practice is not lost to history for our students, but instead evolves with the medium some fear is replacing it.

Reference:

Carr, Nicholas.  (July/August 2008 Issue).  Is Google Making Us Stupid? Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

Kevin@NU