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

by Maryanne Wolf

Years ago the philosopher Martin Heidegger felt that the great danger in an age of technological ingenuity like ours is that it could spawn an “indifference toward meditative thinking. . . .7 Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature—that he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of man’s essential nature—the keeping of the meditative thinking alive.” There is no shortage of contemporary observers of our digital culture who worry like Heidegger that the meditative dimension in human beings is threatened—by an overwhelming emphasis on materialism and consumerism, by a fractured relationship with time. As Teddy Wayne wrote in the New York Times: “Digital media trains us to be high-bandwidth8 consumers rather than meditative thinkers.