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

by Maryanne Wolf

When asked what Buffett had taught him, Gates gently remarked that Buffett had taught him to “fill his calendar with spaces.” In a surprising gesture Buffett pulled out a small paper calendar, less than the size of his hand, and showed all the empty spaces, quietly saying “Time is the one thing no one can buy.” No one spoke for a second and the camera did not move from that avuncular face, as if to preserve in film that simplest but most difficult-to-sustain insight.

Bonhoeffer wrote one of the most moving books I have ever read, Letters and Papers from Prison, after being thrown into concentration camps for his views about Nazi Germany.

We live in a historical “hinge moment” as Robert Darnton21 called it, en route to whole new forms of communication, cognition, and choices that are ultimately, deeply ethical. Unlike during other great transitions, we have the science, the technology, and the ethical imagination necessary to understand the challenges we face before it is too late—if we choose to do so.

The atrophy and gradual disuse of our analytical and reflective capacities as individuals are the worst enemies of a truly democratic society, for whatever reason, in whatever medium, in whatever age.

Twenty years ago Martha Nussbaum wrote about the susceptibility and the decision making of citizens who have ceded their thinking to others: It would be catastrophic to become a nation22 of technically competent people who have lost the ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect the humanity and diversity of others. And yet, unless we support these endeavors, it is in such a nation that we may well live. It is therefore very urgent right now to support curricular efforts aimed at producing citizens who can take charge of their own reasoning, who can see the different and foreign not as a threat to be resisted but as an invitation to explore and understand, expanding their own minds and their capacity for citizenship.

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. And we will fail as a society as surely as societies of the twentieth century if we do not recognize and acknowledge the capacity for reflective reasoning in those who disagree with us.