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

by Maryanne Wolf

There is also a Matthew-Emerson Effect for background knowledge: those who have read widely and well will have many resources to apply to what they read; those who do not will have less to bring, which, in turn, gives them less basis for inference, deduction, and analogical thought and makes them ripe for falling prey to unadjudicated information, whether fake news or complete fabrications. Our young will not know what they do not know. Others, too. Without sufficient background knowledge, the rest of the deep-reading processes will be deployed less often, leading to a situation in which many people will never move outside the boundaries of what they already know. For knowledge to evolve, we need to continuously add to our background knowledge. Paradoxically, most factual information today comes from external sources that can be unadjudicated and without proof of any form. How we analyze and use this information and whether we cease to deploy the time-consuming, critical processes to evaluate new information will significantly impact our future. Absent the checks and balances provided by both our prior knowledge content and our analytical processes, we run the risk of digesting information without questioning whether the quality or prioritization of the information available to us is accurate and free from external motivations and prejudices.