mass-communication-theory

Chapter 3 The Rise of Media Industries and Mass Society Theory 69
multinational alliances and trade relationships that challenge existing elites. Everywhere
older social institutions are questioned and new social roles pioneered. Traditional
forms of communication are abandoned, and new messages and the media
that carry them are embraced. We can see this conflict between the “old” and
“new” in a debate that continue to roil the Internet and the academy, the disappearance
of reading.
Technology writer Nicholas Carr ignited the controversy with his article entitled
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” In it he argued, “It is clear that users are not
reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms
of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents
pages, and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online
to avoid reading in the traditional sense” (2008b, p. 57). Insisting that “deep
reading… is indistinguishable from deep thinking” (p. 62), he admitted that online
reading promotes efficiency, immediacy, and interaction, but “our ability to interpret
text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and
without distraction, remains largely disengaged” (p. 58).
Technology writer Christine Rosen agreed, taking a more macro-level view:
“Enthusiasts and self-appointed experts assure us that this new digital literacy represents
an advance for mankind; the book is evolving, progressing, improving,
they argue, and every improvement demands an uneasy period of adjustment,” she
wrote. “Sophisticated forms of collaborative ‘information foraging’ will replace solitary
deep reading; the connected screen will replace the disconnected book. What
is ‘reading’ anyway, they ask, in a multimedia world like ours? We are increasingly
distractible, impatient, and convenience-obsessed—and the paper book just can’t
keep up. Shouldn’t we simply acknowledge that we are becoming people of the
screen, not people of the book?” (2008, p. 20).
Acclaimed novelist John Updike also spoke of cultural-level change: “Tastes
have coarsened. People read less; they’re less comfortable with the written word.
They’re less comfortable with novels. They don’t have a backward frame of reference
that would enable them to appreciate things like irony and allusions. It’s
sad…. And who’s to blame? Well, everything’s to blame. Movies are to blame….
Television is to blame…. Now we have these cultural developments on the Internet,
and online, and the computer offering itself as a cultural tool, as a tool of distributing
not just information but arts—and who knows what inroads will be made into
the world of the book” (Famed, 2009).
In response, educational psychologist Rand J. Spiro offered a more “modern”
view of reading. Young readers, he said, “aren’t as troubled as some of us older
folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line. That’s a good thing because the
world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments
or chapters…. It takes a long time to read a 400-page book. In a tenth of
the time the Internet allows a reader to cover a lot more of the topic from different
points of view” (in Rich, 2008, p. 14). Language and literacy scholar Donna Alvermann
added, “Kids are using sound and images so they have a world of ideas to
put together that aren’t necessarily language oriented. Books aren’t out of the picture,
but they’re only one way of experiencing information in the world today” (in
Rich, 2008, p. 15).
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