Does reading matter?

I'm in something of a thoughtful mood today and most of it is because of an op-ed I read to day in the Wall Street Journal, entitled "Does Reading Matter?" For those of you not interested in investing that much time in reading a blog post, allow me to summarize:


The main gist of the piece concerns a new study from the National Endowment for the Arts which concludes that people are reading less and less. At the end of the piece the writer suggests that, in the future, those who do not read will find themselves at a noticeable disadvantage.



Around 1439, Johannes Gutenberg got tired of getting hand cramps from the all the writing he had to do and invented moveable type. It changed the world, not only because it made information more accessible but because moving from a culture that was either oral or written to one that was printed changed the way humans think. If you don't agree with me, go argue with Marshall McLuhan. Wait, he's dead. Never mind. However, McLuhan did say this: "Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain and single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition." One of McLuhan's students Walter Ong, claimed television had a similar effect in that it was returning us to what he called a "secondary orality."



If you have kids, you've probably gotten the generalized lecture from some do0gooder about how you should limit the amount of time your kid spends watching TV, playing video games and surfing the web. This often makes me wonder why the schools beg for money to spend on technology and computers on the one hand and then trash them on the other. Several years ago one of my step-daughters breathlessly informed me that they got to use laptops in the computer lab at school. I asked where she sat to use the laptop. She replied, "Oh, in our same seats. We just pushed the keyboard out of the way and sat it in front of the monitor."



I mentioned this story to my brother, who is an elementary school teacher and also the unofficial media tech guru guy, he laughed. "Public schools know they need new technology," he told me, "but they aren't really sure why they need it or what they should use it for. That's why you sometimes end up with goofy stuff like that."



Because I like to play devil's advocate from time to time, I've often been curious about our love/hate relationship with technology. We don't want to ignore it, lest we turn into some technophobic hermit living in a shack in the backwoods of Montana, but we never fully embrace it either. If we did, we'd throw out all of books and revel in a 24 hour American Idol marathon. I think the reason we don't fling ourselves into the abyss is that we worry our mothers will turn out to be right. Television really will turn our brains to mush. By the time we've realized it's happened, it'll be too late to fix it and nobody would be smart enough to anyway.



Does reading matter? For most of us around here (who aspire to be on the other end of that relationship), it does. Books are still very important to many of us, even as technology does its best to render them obsolete. We cling to them almost as if they have a mystical quality about them. Perhaps they do. Perhaps , like technology, we know we need them if we aren't sure why. Too bad more people don't feel that way.