Yes, People Still Read, but Now It's Social
By STEVEN JOHNSON June 18, 2010
"THE point of books is to combat loneliness," David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself," David Lipsky's recently published, book-length interview with him.
If you happen to be reading the book on the Kindle from Amazon, Mr. Wallace's observation has an extra emphasis: a dotted underline running below the phrase. Not because Mr. Wallace or Mr. Lipsky felt that the point was worth stressing, but because a dozen or so other readers have highlighted the passage on their Kindles, making it one of the more "popular" passages in the book.
Amazon calls this new feature "popular highlights." It may sound innocuous enough, but it augurs even bigger changes to come.
Though the feature can be disabled by the user, "popular highlights" will no doubt alarm Nicholas Carr, whose new book, "The Shallows," argues that the compulsive skimming, linking and multitasking of our screen reading is undermining the deep, immersive focus that has defined book culture for centuries.
With "popular highlights," even when we manage to turn off Twitter and the television and sit down to read a good book, there will a chorus of readers turning the pages along with us, pointing out the good bits. Before long, we'll probably be able to meet those fellow readers, share stories with them. Combating loneliness? David Foster Wallace saw only the half of it.
Mr. Carr's argument is that these distractions come with a heavy cost, and his book's publication coincides with articles in various publications - including The New York Times - that report on scientific studies showing how multitasking harms our concentration.
Thus far, the neuroscience of multitasking has tended to follow a predictable pattern. Scientists take a handful of test subjects out of their offices and make them watch colored squares dance on a screen in a lab somewhere. Then they determine that multitasking makes you slightly less able to focus. A study reported on early this month found that heavy multitaskers performed about 10 to 20 percent worse on most tests than light multitaskers.
These studies are undoubtedly onto something - no one honestly believes he is better at focusing when he switches back and forth between multiple activities - but they are meaningless as a cultural indicator without measuring what we gain from multitasking.
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