Ammo for Luddites
Having just read three Ian Fleming novels, one Henry James and one Jonathan Franzen on my new Kindle over the holidays, I found myself vaguely troubled by the feeling that I hadn’t really read them… that their plots and characters might slip out of my memory as easily as they slipped into the Kindle’s.
I told myself this was old-style thinking, that just because I don’t have the actual physical, dog-eared, tea-stained books to shove onto a bookshelf as souvenirs doesn’t mean their contents have engraved themselves any less deeply into my brain.
Now along comes this post by my scarily intelligent friend Jonah Lehrer (and his previous post foreshadowing it), citing a new Princeton study hinting that, maybe, the inchoate unease we bibliophiles have been feeling is more than just sentimental:
This study demonstrated that student retention of material across a wide range of subjects and difficulty levels can be significantly improved in naturalistic settings by presenting reading material in a format that is slightly harder to read.
It reminds me of another study I read a while back, suggesting that elementary school kids who squirm and fidget in their seats actually retain and process information better than if they sat still like they’re supposed to.
I just wish I could remember where I read it.
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I’m not sure the study can possibly control for all factors, exactly due to inchoate factors: “Old Timers” like you and me (PoP on Mac OS ruled!) know what we know.
I’m hardly a Luddite (iPad, iPhone and Mac OS UI/App developer), but I did grow up on books and am probably more plastic than elastic when it comes to certain things.
That doesn’t mean that kids born today won’t be inured to a totally different set of things.
A midway case: check out Inkling for iPad. Each of us has read far more for pleasure than for schooling, and Inkling has textbooks updated to iPad-level technologies. What I saw wasn’t how great the iPad was but all the shortcomings the typical textbook had (e.g., flipping to the back of the book to see the answer to an in-line question and accidentally seeing answers to as-yet-unseen questions).
And as an aside, I know the screenplay changed significantly from the original for the Prince of Persia film and I don’t know if you see that as a good or bad thing, but the final result was a pleasure to watch (I own the Blu-ray). So, thanks.