All Reading is not the Same

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The Medium Matters
Nicholas Carr is the author of “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.” His new book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” will be published in June.

The printed word long ago lost its position of eminence in the American library. If you go into any branch of a public or school library today, you’ll almost certainly see more people staring into Internet terminals than flipping through the pages of books.

It’s hardly a surprise, then, that some educators, librarians, and parents would begin to see books — expensive, cumbersome, distressingly low-tech — as dispensable. Once an oxymoron, the “bookless library” is becoming a reality.

But if we care about the depth of our intellectual and cultural lives, we’ll see that emptying our libraries of books is not an example of progress. It’s an example of regress.

The pages of a book shield us from the distractions that bombard us during most of our waking hours. As an informational medium, the book focuses our attention, encouraging the kind of immersion in a story or an argument that promotes deep comprehension and deep learning.

When we read from the screen of a multifunctional computing device, whether it’s a PC, a Smartphone, a Kindle, or an iPad, we sacrifice that singlemindedness. Our attention is scattered by all the distractions and interruptions that pour through our computers and digital networks. The result, a raft of psychological and neurological studies show, is cursory reading, weak comprehension and shallow learning.

We may not want to admit it, but the medium matters. When we tell ourselves that reading is the same whether done from a screen or a book, we’re kidding ourselves — and cheating our kids.