Consider the Experiment

Back in high school, I recall reading Alexandre Dumas’ “The Count of Monte Christo,” and rather enjoying it. Same for Arthur Miller’s “Death of A Salesman.”

I’ve always been a big reader, though over time – then, not just now – my interest in reading waxed and waned. In the fourth grade, for example, I got an A+ in reading one quarter because I gave 43 book reports. The grade fell as the quarters went on, however, because the number of books I read diminished (also, I recall the book report form leaping from 1/3 of a page to a full page, so that slowed me down a bit too).

I have recently re-read both Salesman and Monte Christo.

Death of A Salesman still captures me, pulls me into the story, makes me feel for Willy Loman and his hapless sons.

The Count of Monte Christo, however . . .

Parts of it I like. But there’s so much that still could have been cut from the short version I read in high school. I happened upon the full version while living in France and left it at the bookstore, all three volumes, densely packed with Napoleonic history and French.

The book itself didn’t change from when I read it in high school from when I read it recently. Perhaps what changed is my patience with a lumbering story.

Not the Internet.

I still read a lot in physical books. And generally, I find reading physical books a joy. I also read quite a bit on the Internet, and find a lot of good stuff to read there as well.

My reading books doesn’t diminish my ability to read on the Internet, nor do my reading forays on the Internet diminish my facility for reading physical books.

I’m impatient with lumbering writing – including my own – no matter what media it appears in.
So I’m dubious about folks who complain the Internet has made the difference in their reading ability.

For example:

Wolf resolved to allot a set period every day to reread a novel she had loved as a young woman, Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi. It was exactly the sort of demanding text she’d once reveled in. But now she discovered to her dismay that she could not bear it. “I hated the book,” she writes. “I hated the whole so-called experiment.” She had to force herself to wrangle the novel’s “unnecessarily difficult words and sentences whose snakelike constructions obfuscated, rather than illuminated, meaning for me.” The narrative action struck her as intolerably slow. She had, she concluded, “changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels, which forced me constantly to go back and reread the same sentence over and over with increasing frustration.” She had lost the “cognitive patience” that once sustained her in reading such books. She blamed the internet.

The above is from Laura Miller's review of Maryanne Wolf's book "Reader, Come Home," where Wolf trots out the tired notion that reading a lot on the Internet has destroyed her ability to think deeply about reading in general.

I find this kind of thinking to be a load of hooey.

My posit: The Internet isn’t changing how we read texts. Rather, our recognition of bad texts increases with the amount of material read. As we go back to a book we enjoyed once as a youngster, we’re bringing with the rose-colored memory of enjoyment the memory of just about every other text experience we’ve had. Even if we think we should enjoy the text as much as we did back then, what we have read -- and no matter where we've read it from -- is going to add to or taint that re-reading experience. We’re going to recognize poorly-written text more quickly now than we would then, because we have more experience with more text in general, no matter what media it comes in.

In other words, it's the sum of what we read that changes us, not what form we read it in.