Mark Bauerlein response to Douglas Rushkoff

I don't know what digital technology entails for human nature and human being in the coming years, Doug, but I am certain that an important element is being lost: the habit and practice of linear, deliberative reading and writing. Two weeks ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Google boss Eric Schmidt asserted just that, stating "The one that I worry about is the question of 'deep reading,'" and worrying that "instantaneous devices" cut into "reading all forms of literature, books, magazines, and so forth."

This is a profound loss, and it needs to be opposed, not assimilated. But the opposition shouldn't be a blanket disconnection. Instead, we need to preserve some non-digital spaces and times in our lives, realms in which the cut-off is intentional and habitual. Part of that involves home customs such as 15 minutes at the breakfast table with a print newspaper (not an online version) and an hour of reading time after dinner. ...

It also should happen in school. Here's what I wrote in The Futurist Magazine last month.

"In 2020, schools will indeed sport fabulous gadgets, devices, and interfaces of learning, but each school will also have one contrary space, a small preserve that has no devices or access, no connectivity at all. There, students will study basic subjects without screens or keyboards present -- only pencils, books, old newspapers and magazines, blackboards and slide rules. Students will compose paragraphs by hand, do percentages by long division, and look up a fact by opening a book, not checking Wikipedia. When they get a research assignment, they'll head to the stacks, the reference room, and the microfilm drawers."

Why? For sound educational reasons. What nondigital space will do, apart from cultivating linear, slow reading and writing skills (which are deteriorating), is provide a critical perspective on the digital spaces. Again, from The Futurist:

"The nondigital space will appear, then, not as an antitechnology reaction but as a nontechnology complement. Before the digital age, pen and paper were normal tools of writing, and students had no alternative to them. The personal computer and Web 2.0 have displaced these tools, creating a new technology and a whole new set of writing habits. This endows pen and paper with a new identity, a critical, even adversarial one. In the nondigital space, students learn to resist the pressures of conformity and custom, to think and write against the fast and faster modes of the Web. Disconnectivity, then, serves a crucial educational purpose, forcing students to recognize the technology everywhere around them and to see it from a critical distance."