The limited salubrious benefits of reading.
Adam Gopnik has another typically fine article in the current issue of The New Yorker ("The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us"); essentially his piece is a multi-book review essay of the type that Harper's Magazine typically publishes, in which he looks at various books extolling, condemning or shrugging off the increasing influence of the Internet on Americans.
The entire piece is definitely worth a perusal, but one paragraph (on page 5 of 10, if you print the article out) in particular jumped out at me:
"...Nicholas Carr [in The Shallows] cites Martin Heidegger for having seen, in the mid-fifties, that new technologies would break the meditational space on which Western wisdoms depend. Since Heidegger had not long before walked straight out of his own meditational space into the arms of the Nazis, it’s hard to have much nostalgia for this version of the past. One feels the same doubts when Sherry Turkle, in Alone Together, her touching plaint about the destruction of the old intimacy-reading culture by the new remote-connection-Internet culture, cites studies that show a dramatic decline in empathy among college students, who apparently are 'far less likely to say that it is valuable to put oneself in the place of others or to try and understand their feelings.' What is to be done? Other[s] point to research that’s supposed to show that people who read novels develop exceptional empathy. But if reading a lot of novels gave you exceptional empathy university English departments should be filled with the most compassionate and generous-minded of souls, and, so far, they are not."
*SNORK*
Oh, true dat, Adam; true dat.....
The entire piece is definitely worth a perusal, but one paragraph (on page 5 of 10, if you print the article out) in particular jumped out at me:
"...Nicholas Carr [in The Shallows] cites Martin Heidegger for having seen, in the mid-fifties, that new technologies would break the meditational space on which Western wisdoms depend. Since Heidegger had not long before walked straight out of his own meditational space into the arms of the Nazis, it’s hard to have much nostalgia for this version of the past. One feels the same doubts when Sherry Turkle, in Alone Together, her touching plaint about the destruction of the old intimacy-reading culture by the new remote-connection-Internet culture, cites studies that show a dramatic decline in empathy among college students, who apparently are 'far less likely to say that it is valuable to put oneself in the place of others or to try and understand their feelings.' What is to be done? Other[s] point to research that’s supposed to show that people who read novels develop exceptional empathy. But if reading a lot of novels gave you exceptional empathy university English departments should be filled with the most compassionate and generous-minded of souls, and, so far, they are not."
*SNORK*
Oh, true dat, Adam; true dat.....