:: Black and white and read less often ::

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Twilight of the Books: A Critic at Large: The New Yorker

In a study published this year, experimenters varied the way that people took in a PowerPoint presentation about the country of Mali. Those who were allowed to read silently were more likely to agree with the statement "The presentation was interesting," and those who read along with an audiovisual commentary were more likely to agree with the statement "I did not learn anything from this presentation." The silent readers remembered more, too, a finding in line with a series of British studies in which people who read transcripts of television newscasts, political programs, advertisements, and science shows recalled more information than those who had watched the shows themselves.

Despite having a mad hot love affair with technology I do worry sometimes about how our chosen media of communication and entertainment affect our ability to think. My biggest fear relates to multi-tasking and the erosion of the global attention span, but the atrophy of our faculties for retention and critical analysis as we rely more upon orality isn't far behind. I will refer for the third time on this blog (now with Wikipedia citation!) to Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, whose omission from this article surprised me, as it's as relevant today as when it was published in 1985.

Posted by morland @ 10:17 PM

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