Maryanne Wolf is a cognitive scientist who has made research on reading as her chief occupation in life. Currently, she is Director Centre for Reading and Language Research Tufts University. Her first book, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, analyzed the reading process in detail. In her latest book, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Wolf explores the difference between reading a physical book with deep attention and our encounters with digital reading, where many people skim through thousands of words daily. As we all know, digital reading and devices have significantly impacted our attention span. The continuous exposure to digital reading with less attention differs from reading dense prose, which demands considerable attention. However, there is going back from our digital devices, and they are here to stay.
Here Wolf has a very important objective. Train students to become biliterate. Make children attain digital literacy and the capacity for deep reading simultaneously. Unlike spoken language, reading and writing do not come naturally to human beings. However, it is these two skills which made our civilization. This being the case, how digital reading affects our capacity to think matters a lot in shaping our future. As the author says, “Digital media are increasing the volume and tempo of visual stimuli, we fail to reckon with the fact that the increase of tempo means that there is a correlative decrease in the time that the viewer has to respond. If we relate this insight to the deep-reading circuit, less time to process and perceive means less time to connect the incoming information to one’s background knowledge and thus less likelihood that the rest of the deep-reading processes will be deployed”. There may be disagreements with some of the arguments of Wolf. But it does not diminish the significance of this book which explores the theme of reading in this digital age with a rare depth.
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