All My Tweets For the Week Ending 2009-10-25

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1. Danny Blloom says:

   Nov 4, 2009 at 11:52 pm

   The Hogwash Statement:

   Danny Bloom and “Screening” – new word for the kind of reading we do on screens: good idea? bad idea? Matthew, what’s your POV or take on this? Email me at danbloom AT??????????????

   I’ve heard from blogger Danny Bloom about his campaign to coin a neologism to describe the behavior we undertake when we seek to decode and comprehend text displayed on computer screens. He’s concerned that this behavior and its impact on brains is fundamentally different from “reading,” and that neuroscientists may not be paying sufficient attention to this emergent phenomenon. As Bloom himself puts it,

   to search for a new word (if needed, and if useful!) is to point out the need for scholars and scientists to study the very real differences between reading on paper and reading on screens, and not just with learned opinions and surveys, but with hard science — that is to say, MRI brain scan studies in laboratory settings and hospital rooms to study — firsthand! up close and personal! — white matter and grey matter neural pathways and try to ascertain if reading on paper surfaces lights up different parts of the brain compared to reading on a screen.

   Danny Bloom calls his manifesto “The Hogwash Statement.” ” [GOOGLE] For all that I care,” he writes, “the new word could be ‘hogwash’, as in ‘I’m hogwashing Moby Dick on my Kindle tonight.'” The main thing, he asserts, is that experts—and the rest of us—start paying attention to the differences between reading paper-based texts and those served up by electronic devices.

   Indeed there already is a great deal of interest among neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and educators in the neurology, the biology, of reading. Researchers are using MRI and other technologies, along with tried-and-true cognitive testing, to limn the circuits that reading forges and follows in the brain. And some of these researchers are turning their interest on the question of reading v. “screening,” as Bloom says. A few links—

   Jonah Lehrer, a friend of mine and a great science writer, covers this topic in a recent blog post (see his book Proust was a Neuroscientist for much more);

   he cites a recent brain imaging study comparing brain pathways of “expert reading” to those of struggling readers;

   there’s the recent NYTimes piece polling various sorts of experts on the brain’s receptivity to ebooks (which includes David Gelertner’s short piece, which I link to in my reverse e-book post);

   and Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, subtitled The Story of Science and the Reading Brain. Wolf (who also gets space in the Times feature linked to above) is especially concerned about the neural implications of the switch from paper to screens.

   Of course to say “paper to screens” is a massive simplification of the transformation that’s underway. The cognitive, cultural, and technological shift we’re experiencing goes well beyond the medium of the literal surface to embrace electronic networks, the durability of texts, the ways we experience and share them … every aspect of reading and writing. But reading is always already undergoing constant transformation. Try reading a gothic manuscript from the 14th century with its many scribal abbreviations, its exotic letterforms, its strange way of organizing and managing words on the page. It’s nearly impenetrable, even to the student of Latin. What’s the implication? In the 14th century, brains were different. They were different in the 17th, and the 19th; they were different in Greece in 600 BCE. As we’ve gone from “claying” to “papyring” to “velluming” to “papering” to “screening,” our brains have reorganized themselves—reorganizing the media as they go. But where do we locate “reading” in that history? Is there one essential point at which it all culminates? Or does the process of transformation itself represent the essence of “reading”?

   New means of putting text together are also new ways of putting the brain together. But that neural plasticity is what we do as humans; that, in a word, is reading, whatever the media.

2. Danny Blloom says:

   Nov 4, 2009 at 11:54 pm

   http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2009/10/hogwash-statement-by-danny-bloom.html

   The Hogwash Statement:
   composed on a Mac screen by Danny Bloom
   Webpasted: October 31, 2009

   The point of all this is not so much to coin a new word — God knows
   there are enough neologisms already, the reading field surely doesn’t
   need a new word for “reading” if “reading” is fine for “reading on a
   computer screen” — and for all that I care, the new word could be
   “hogwash”, as in “I’m hogwashing ‘Moby Dick’ on my Kindle tonight” —
   so the real point of my public crusade/campaign to search for a new
   word (if needed, and if useful!) is to point out the need for scholars
   and scientists to study the very real differences between reading on
   paper and reading on screens, and not just with learned opinions and
   surveys, but with hard science — that is to
   say, MRI brain scan studies in laboratory settings and hospital rooms
   to study — firsthand! up close and personal! — white matter and grey
   matter neural pathways and try to ascertain if reading on paper
   surfaces lights up different parts of the brain compared to reading on
   a screen.

   That is all this campaign is about. I don’t care to coin a
   new name for reading on screens. I am not a name coiner. I have no
   interest in coining a new word for screen-reading. If a new word or term
   does come to us, great. If not, that’s okay, too. All I want to do
   is to egg scientists and
   neuro-scientists on to study these issues with MRI scan tissues. Then we will
   really know what the differences between paper reading and screen
   reading really mean.

   Question: Why am I so concerned and seemingly obsessed about this? I
   worry about the future of human civilization! If screen-reading turns
   out to be a bit inferior to paper reading — in terms of which parts
   of the brain light up for things like processing info, retention,
   analysis, critical thinking, empathy, digesting, internalizing,
   understanding, etc — then we need to know this.

   That’s my hunch. That’s all I want to know. Let the brain scans begin!

   ????????????

   You make a very good point there. Like so many technological advances, we’ve added this one to our lives just because we can. But with this, medical research, and other sciences, we do these things without having an over-riding ethics about them, without consciously making a decision about whether or not we really do want these things to form such a big part of our lives.

   There’s a good show airing on the BBC just now called Electric Dreams, in which an English family’s home is re-made to look and operate like a home from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s (with each day advancing them forward technologically by a year). Watching the family from the outside, I can’t help but feel that, for all the convenience it adds, the technology takes away a great deal of the family’s shared life. In other words, it doesn’t do them any good