Where to for the Novel
The novel, Wikipedia says, may have been around for two thousand years, or at least since the eighteenth century. Will it undergo a decline or demise in the twenty-first century?
The Washington Post ran a feature (re-printed in The Dominion Post, April 23, 2014) that horrified me with the attention-grabbing sub-header: “Humans seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming, making it difficult to read a novel”.
According to the feature, cognitive neuroscientists are also alarmed. One of them, Maryanne Wolf, poses the question: “Will we become Twitter brains?”
No offence to Twitter, but are social networks going to create a generation who can no longer read in a linear way?
Will the novel have to change to appeal to non-linear readers? Is the novel already being re-shaped by young fiction writers?
I don’t know the answers but I’d like to see a dialogue on the subject among people who are better informed than me.
The Washington Post ran a feature (re-printed in The Dominion Post, April 23, 2014) that horrified me with the attention-grabbing sub-header: “Humans seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming, making it difficult to read a novel”.
According to the feature, cognitive neuroscientists are also alarmed. One of them, Maryanne Wolf, poses the question: “Will we become Twitter brains?”
No offence to Twitter, but are social networks going to create a generation who can no longer read in a linear way?
Will the novel have to change to appeal to non-linear readers? Is the novel already being re-shaped by young fiction writers?
I don’t know the answers but I’d like to see a dialogue on the subject among people who are better informed than me.
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