Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

by Maryanne Wolf

that it is more important to react than to think deeply. . . . Reading is an act of contemplation . . . an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction. . . . It returns us to a reckoning with time.

we enter a totally invisible, personal realm, our private “holding ground”6 where we can contemplate all manner of human existence and ponder a universe whose real mysteries dwarf any of our imagination.

Emphasis on the INDIVIDUAL

We download or stream a song, article, book or movie instantly, get through it (if we’re not waylaid by the infinite inventory also offered) and advance to the next immaterial thing.”

Or we follow paths in a web that were unimaginable and unavailable

only the allocation of time

Yes, but time by itself is not likely to solve the problem for the current context

The worst atrocities of the twentieth century bear tragic witness to what occurs when a society fails to examine its own actions and cedes its analytical powers to those who tell them how to think and what to fear.

If I were a philosopher how would I parse this argument?

Two of the greatest mistakes of the twenty-first century, therefore, would be to ignore those of the twentieth century and fail to evaluate whether we have already begun to cede our critical analytical powers and independent judgment to others in our increasingly fissured society. Few people, if pressed, would contest that such a diminishment of our collective critical faculties has already begun. What would be contested is in whom and why.

Yes, Trump is a fascist and must be resisted, but the problem described predates the last 50 years.

“The delicate game of democracy provides24 for a dialectic of opinions and beliefs in the hope that such exchange will expand the collective moral conscience that is the basis of orderly cohabitation.”

How idealistic can you get

We will fail as a society if we do not educate our children and reeducate all of our citizenry to the responsibility of each citizen to process information vigilantly, critically, and wisely across media.

Define educate My guess is that the author's scenario isn't that different that what we see at elite inscribes Institutions

views but from the failure to ensure that all citizens are educated to use their full intellectual powers in forming those views.

But that has NEVER been the situation for the black population. Still think the author idealized and wants to reproduce the greatest hits of her own experience

If these capacities are endangered, if good readers are endangered, so are we all.

Or is this just one wing of the bourgeoisie screaming to the other . . . Wake the fuck up, since surely this is a profoundly privileged view of reality