A US study recently reported that in 1980, 60 percent of 18-year-old school students read a book, newspaper, or magazine everyday that wasn’t assigned to them. By 2016, that number had plummeted to only 16 percent. Instead, they spent six hours a day texting, on social media, or online.
There’s a general anxiety about the capacity of children and young adults in the digital age to read anything longer than a screen grab. Dr Judith Seaboyer, senior lecturer in the School of Communications and Arts at the University of Queensland, tells Kathryn Ryan we should take this unease seriously.
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She says there’s no real problem with reading from screens unless it overtakes the capacity to read deeply.
“We were never designed to read, we were designed for speech. We’re hard wired for speech, we’re not hard wired for reading, we have to learn to do it.”
Dr Seaboyer says it’s great that children are reading from iPads and playing with iPads from a very early age, but it doesn’t engage the brain in such a way to develop a capacity for deep reading that children get from diving into a book.
“If children don’t do that as well, they’ll only have that kind of surface experience. They’ll be active, productive citizens, they’ll have fun and enjoy things, but a life of contemplation will be closed off to them, they won’t have that.”
She says that when children and young adults engage with more complex texts, they learn how to think for themselves and engage in critical thought about the text, rather than being provided with information and taking it at face value.
“It’s closer to meditation and losing yourself in a book is really important. Being able to go into a different space, away from the one you’re in at the moment. It allows us to see things from the position of the Other and it allows us to change the way we see the world.
“We’re in a very dangerous, violent world at the moment and, if we lose that capacity to think deeply and think about the position of the Other and from the position of the Other, then we might as well just give up.”
Dr Seaboyer says it’s not just youth who need to engage in deep reading, adults can fall out of the habit too and need to make sure they make time for novels and complex texts. She suggests we turn off our phones and computers and set aside at least 20 minutes each day to read.
“Turn all that stuff off and go and focus. After a time, you get back into it and you are deep reading.”
