As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.
But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.
I've had quite a few interesting conversations with people about this article in the past week, and, while they've been rather in depth, something felt inherently lacking. We didn't seem to be talking about the same thing, and every time someone brought up a new point, I felt like arguing against what they were saying because, despite being in agreement, there was still something disjointed or unconnected. It was only after reading the previous article that I understood why I couldn't make any coherent arguments; it's because this article is not coherent in a sense that it needs to be. By tackling all of "internet reading," the article clumps together sites like Fanfiction.net and Quizilla.com with reading newspapers and scholarly journals online. It is also trying to make a case that internet reading is not linear reading, and that it is a sort of jumbled amalgam of what people hopskip over in their internet travels. Because Rich tries to make a conclusion about internet reading without defining what kind of reading, done by whom, and for what purpose, the article collapses in on itself, a veritable sampling of quotes and anecdotes that contradicts or misrepresents its own point.
I assume that a large part of what Rich wanted to do, judging by the title, is focus on the repercussion of the reading and writing community found solely online. This discards the ho ho irony of reading the New York Times online and the consequences of books available as through Project Gutenberg. As a result, the question that she would and does run into is whether or not the quality of writing available affects literacy. Her argument on this focuses on her teen case study Nadia, who is a regular reading and writer on fanfiction.net and quizilla.com. She presents a very pointed view of her: Nadia posts ("publishes," in another sense of the word) a story with a blatant misspelling in the title; the story features a reincarnation as a half-human, half cat; she doesn't believe that you need to read books to become an English major in college; and so on. As I'm sure Rich intends, she represents the stereotype of this modern reading age.
While Rich doesn't explicitly pass judgment on her, she cherrypicks lines and actions to make her a veritable illiterate caricature, which I had a serious problem with. After explaining the nature of Nadia's fanfiction, she cuts to critics of internet reading without trying the two together. Critics say that internet makes people lose the ability to sustain interest, don't allow them to critically engage in literature in a way that books do. The way the article is laid out, it makes it seem as though Nadia is one of those people, when, in fact, it's precisely the opposite. Ken Pugh, the neuroscientist from Yale that Rich seems to be arbitrarily quoting from, should be a proponent of fanfiction. "[T]aking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing" is precisely what fanfiction is. Writing stories, no matter how terrible, requires a level of attention and care that reading a book for the sake of reading a book does not. The act of being in a fanfiction community-- again, no matter how bad-- is being in a community that is engaged with a body of text. In no way can you equate that to being someone who does not read.
I would assert that Rich's treatment of Nadia's writing and reading is the result of the outsider perspective. The internet exposes us in ways previously impossible, and Rich's treatment of Nadia's writing is patently unfair. She seems to think that it is more significant that Nadia is posting stories with misspellings in the title than it is that she is writing and that she is critically involved with the text. This undoubtedly bad writing is a signal that kids can't write, that literacy is doomed because this girl can't write a novel at the age of fourteen. While I can't make excuses for Nadia's title, I do want to say that by giving this example, Rich is doing the equivalent of thrusting one of Annie Dillard's shitty first drafts into the limelight and using that as a way of saying that Dillard is a shitty writer, that she'll never develop that writing into something better. Only you'd have to scale that back a few decades or so, and assume that she'll never change from what she wrote as a fourteen-year-old. Nadia's writing is a snapshot of all fourteen-year-old's writing, only up on the internet rather than read aloud in class. (Also, Rich betrays her internet naivete by giving the readers all the information they need to find her stories online, basically outing this pseudonym to the world. I trust that most readers of the NYT aren't the type of people to troll her stuff, but, as I found, there is already at least one person who reviewed her story on fanfiction.net with a virtual tonguelashing.)
As for the type of reading online not found in fanfiction (which I would consider to be linear and not too different from reading a book) but more related to the hopskipping across websites, I don't see why that's related to the decrease in people reading books. My mind could be changed about this, but I don't really know if it's that much different than reading the backs of books, the subheads of articles, or the abstracts of scholarly papers. Don't we browse magazines and newspapers like that anyway? What kind of pre-internet reading is this being compared to? And, on a different line of questioning, what does it mean that web users are "persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy"? I am intrigued by this, because I could believe it, but I am skeptical of the example that Rich gave. People are a generally trusting bunch and I don't believe that if the Tree Octopus article was written in a magazine format of a hypothetical cephalopod magazine that people would condemn it immediately as false. Isn't the fact that Leu linked to outside websites testament to the fact that people on the internet expect corroboration between sources?
In either case, the more I think about the article, the more frustrated I am by it. It could have gone several extremely interesting ways, but Rich's description of the internet as a whole denies or devalues the more mature, substantive types of reading available. Instead of looking at those types of communities or even looking at legitimate statistics, she seems to depend on pullquotes from committees and professors and lacks any sort of hard evidence. By flattening "the internet" into some single entity that lacks nuance or depth, she does a great disservice to the people who are reading this article online, who comment, who review, who do anything involving the exchange of ideas through the written word.
After all, we're apparently the reason people don't read anymore. Hooray for correlation.
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