What happened to reading? Part 2
Digital consumption damages kids’ ability to read, yet it's far more alluring than books.
Originally published in the Moultrie News.
What happened to reading?
Last week, we began analyzing causes of the reading decline among American students, including drops in reading proficiency and frequency.
The villain you’re most likely to blame can be referred to by a number of apt phrases, including the Screen Revolution, the Digitalization of the American Mind, or even Attack of the Phones.
According to the Pew Research Center, a substantial majority of teens are on social media “almost constantly” out of school, with most teens reporting it would be “difficult” for them to give it up. I couldn’t find any studies on how many teens would find it “difficult” to give up books (I bet it’s not many), but studies indicate less than 13 percent read for pleasure nearly every day, never mind “almost constantly.”
I’ve read about the Hula Hoop craze of the 1950s, and, of course, we all spent a lot of time in front of the TV in our day, but we’ve never experienced anything like this. Social media and Internet culture is a different animal. Hula Hoops and sports require exercise. Even watching TV in the age of commercial television required attention and patience. Today’s phones, tablets, and laptops, however, produce an unending stream of on-demand content tailored through scientific algorithms to keep users swiping endlessly in a sedentary thrall of addiction.
Given the glut of online content we permit kids to devour, it’s fair to ask how it might be affecting their reading.
Answer: badly.
Neurological experiments from Johns Hopkins University and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital indicate that digital media consumption, particularly for young children, inhibits the brain’s ability to read proficiently by impeding the development of brain regions necessary for comprehension.
Literacy expert MaryAnne Wolf explains that the engagement provided by digital media is too passive, so it overutilizes the so-called “novelty reflex” that allows us to process new sensory information. “This is the last thing we want for child development,” she said, “because we’re wanting them to learn to focus. Instead, they are learning to be distracted.”
That’s not good for reading, and it may explain why educators have seen a significant decline in reading proficiency since 2012, the period when smartphones proliferated. In an article for EducationWeek, elementary teacher Jackie Chaney notes the crucial collapse in children’s reading traits: “With the ‘microwave world’ that we live in nowadays, students want that immediate engagement and quick response. They do not want to wait and explore novels, delve into characters and settings, and enjoy the twists and turns of plots.”
Social media’s addictive algorithms and simplistic, “lowest common denominator” communication style are having two significant impacts on reading: 1. It’s making students less interested in everything else, including books. Instagram and TikTok’s carefully crafted psychological machinations unleash a tidal wave of endorphins compared to cracking the spine of a book. Result: more TikTok; fewer books. 2. With early exposure to digital media over conventional reading, kids’ abilities to process books’ comparatively sophisticated vocabulary and sentence structures have plummeted straight into an abyss.
For this and a load of other good reasons, on Nov. 29, Australia became the first country to ban social media for kids under 16. Good for them. But it’s still important to remember that phones don’t kill kids’ brains on their own; the people who give kids those phones are willful co-conspirators, and the responsibility falls on every parent who fails to regulate their use.
And yet, the problem isn’t just phones and parents. The studies cited above show that all digital consumption, including through laptops and video games, can contribute to neurological degradation. Schools are currently in the throes of a digital saturnalia and must bear some accountability for this. Too many teachers sedate their students with laptops and tablets rather than enduring the rigors of active instruction.
This is the hard truth: Digital consumption damages kids’ ability to read, yet it is far more alluring than books. Adults have groomed and fostered children’s unrestrained indulgence. Now we face a future surging with people who neither want to read nor can do it well.
Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.