Philip Rosedale response to Mark Bauerlein

Hi! Although sequentially reading the individual words comprising an entire novel is a wonderful and complete experience (I'm 41 and spent a big part of my childhood reading everything I could well before computers were available), the most recent research in how the brain is probably organized suggests a better fit between the way we 'read' in the digital world of today and the way we actually store and manipulate information internally. The magnificent sense of 'getting' Great Expectations has to do with fractal/hierarchical memories that are simultaneously evoked and span different levels of abstraction/cognition. So each of us a has a different (but fairly similar) high level 'memory' of what Victorian women were life, for example. That feeling can be instantly evoked by a small trigger - like reading any part of that book. The act of coming to deeply understand the text is the act of connecting and storing a bunch of associations that become your memory of the book. This actually fits pretty well with the cliffnotes + chat + a couple of pictures + a couple of blogs model that compresses a long text into a few minutes of what are effectively short evocative hyperlinks.

I think what causes stress and is worthy of discussion is that the process of reading all the words and the process of assembling these rapid associations can produce different patterns of understanding. But what personally find remarkable is that we've created a system of intake (the internet) that actually can so enormously speed the process by being more similar to our actual thinking and memories.