"Texts without Context"

I don't know if I've ever sent around an article asking our entire faculty to read it. I am today.

This article (Texts without Context) by the New York Times lead book critic tries to get a handle on how our reading habits and thinking abilities are being influenced by the technology we use. Citing a half-dozen recent books on aspects of the subject, she shares a number of excerpts that reflect trends we see in our students and, perhaps, in ourselves.

The concern is that we are no longer reading completely, deeply, or widely, and how that impacts our willingness and capacity to reason.

It is important for us to be aware of these fundamental shifts in how we encounter information and frame meaning because it calls into questions teaching precepts that may no longer be true: the sanctity of original ideas, the value of original ideas over comments about original ideas, encountering opposing ideas as a way to develop perspective and common ground, creativity over mash-ups.

I ask us to read this not because I expect us to embrace these changes or ignore them, not to excuse a lack of rigor in our students or our expectations of them, but to make these issues part of our conversations about what we teach and how we teach, and how we as gate-keepers to knowledge and citizenship might take a more active role in shaping technology habits in our students.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced...

And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking...

As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,” Mr. Carr writes in “The Shallows,” authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement ...

“Serendipitous encounters” with persons and ideas different from one’s own, he writes, tend to grow less frequent, while “views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible or bizarre in most communities...”

For that matter, the very value of artistic imagination and originality, along with the primacy of the individual, is increasingly being questioned in our copy-mad, postmodern digital world...All too often, however, the recycling and cut-and-paste esthetic has resulted in tired imitations; cheap, lazy re-dos; or works of “appropriation” designed to generate controversy like Mr. Shields’s “Reality Hunger.”