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

by Maryanne Wolf

As we walked higher and higher to where the trees began to thin, I told him of my worries about the possible effects of the culture’s trend toward language homogenization: from the narrowing of an author’s word choices to briefer manuscripts to a more constrained use of syntactic complexity and figurative language, both of which require background knowledge that can no longer be assumed. What, then, will be the fate, he asked, of books and poems filled with metaphors and analogies whose referents are no longer shared knowledge? What would happen if a culture’s shared repertoire of allusions—metaphors from the Bible, myths, and fables; remembered lines of poems; characters from stories—begins to shrink and gradually disappear? What will happen, this learned publisher, who reads in multiple languages, asked, if the “language of books” no longer fits the culture’s cognitive style—fast, heavily visual, and artificially truncated? Will writing change and with it the reader, the writer, the publisher, language itself? Are we each witnessing in our different professions the beginning of a retreat from more intellectually demanding forms of language until—like the ill-fated procrustean bed—it conforms to the imperceptibly narrowing norms of reading on ever smaller screens?