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

by Maryanne Wolf

What do we do with the cognitive overload from multiple gigabytes of information from multiple devices? First, we simplify. Second, we process the information as rapidly as possible; more precisely, we read more in briefer bursts. Third, we triage. We stealthily begin the insidious trade-off between our need to know with our need to save and gain time. Sometimes we outsource our intelligence to the information outlets that offer the fastest, simplest, most digestible distillations of information we no longer want to think about ourselves. And just as in many a translation from one language to another, things go missing—from the slackened use of our own individual analytic powers to a culture in which complex ideas are no longer the dominant currency. When we retreat from the intrinsic complexity of human life for whatever reason, often as not we turn to what conforms to the narrowing confines of what we already know, never shaking or testing that base, never looking outside the boundaries of our past thought with all its earlier assumptions and sometimes dormant but ready-to-pounce prejudices.