The Transitional Generation

I mentioned Howard Reingold before -- today he sent out a series of tweets that I found intriguing...I am reproducing them for you here. You know that the limit on Twitter is 140 characters, so he just sent out a long series, referencing a book entitled Proust and the Squid. Hmm.


Reingold begins here:
Rereading Maryanne Wolf's "Proust & The Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain." A few short quotes are germane to N. Carr et al:

Fletcher here: [You will recall that Nicolas Carr is the author of "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and The Shallows}

Back to Reingold, quoting Wolf: "In the transmission of knowledge the children & teachers of the future should not be faced with a choice between books and screens,

"...between newspapers and capsuled versions of the news on the Internet, or between print and other media.

"Our transition generation has an opportunity, if we seize it, to pause & use our most reflective capacities, to use everything

"at our disposal to prepare for the formation of what will come next.

"The analytical, inferential, perspective-taking reading brain with all its capacity for human consciousness, and the nimble,

multifunctional, multimodal, information-integrative capacities of a digital mind-set do not need to inhabit exclusive realms.

"Many of our children learn to code-switch between two or more oral languages, and we can teach them also to switch between

different presentations of written language and different modes of analysis."

End Reingold

I hope you see that this is a discussion of the tension between print and digital media. They need not be exclusive, obviously. Even Postman asserts that TV is not going anywhere. We must bring consciousness to our consumption of multiple media, and keep our analytical brains engaged.