Read on a tablet or a laptop? If you do, it may well be changing how you perceive, understand and integrate what you are reading. At least that is what a new study from Dartmouth College’s Tiltfactor Lab shows.
The study involved two groups reading the same article – one group on a digital platform and the other on good old paper. Those reading digitally scored lowered on questions requiring inference and more abstract thinking. So is digital media making us “dumber”? Not so fast. While inference and abstraction are clearly important, it turns out that those reading digitally also scored higher when answering concrete questions of fact.
As is so often the case, we learn once again that the “how” and the “what” are intimately connected, and the real issue is not what medium makes you smarter or dumber, but what you aim to accomplish when you are reading. The “why” is more important that either the “how” or the “what”, as it so often is, especially when we have multiple options.
When you know why you are reading, you will then be well-positioned to decide how to read. Not surprisingly, each way of acquiring information and experience will have its costs and benefits, and the only think to fear is the often offered, and rarely true, claim that you can have it all.
But now that we have “solved” that issue, we can turn to the more powerful and potentially more debilitating impact of digital reporting – the need to grab attention with outsized claims, especially of the negative variety. The article referenced above warns of the threat of our minds shrinking, of the loss of conceptual thought, and generally invites us to beware the potentially nefarious impact of digital media. None of that is exactly what the study suggests, not to mention that those offering the warnings are doing it through digital media! What is going on?
The bigger story here is not the negative impact of reading digitally. The real story here is how the digital world – so often measured in clicks and eyeballs alone – incentivizes the overreaching, especially when it comes to shocking or scaring us. I don’t know that we can do much about this (would I have payed attention without the “sky is falling” approach? I honestly don’t know.), nor do I think that the challenge is unique to digital media. The old adage about “if it bleeds, it leads” pre-dates the internet by 100 years.
I only know that there is usually more to any story that how it is told to us, or sold to us, and that with ever-increasing ability to receive more and more information, we need to make ever greater efforts to go beyond the headlines, and definitely be aware not only of what we are reading it, but why we are reading it. And if all that is true for ideas, it is at least as true for people – who are, as a rule, at least as complex as any text we choose to read.
Listed for many years in Newsweek as one of America’s “50 Most Influential Rabbis” and recognized as one of our nation’s leading “Preachers and Teachers,” by Beliefnet.com, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield serves as the President of Clal–The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, a training institute, think tank, and resource center nurturing religious and intellectual pluralism within the Jewish community, and the wider world, preparing people to meet the biggest challenges we face in our increasingly polarized world.
An ordained Orthodox rabbi who studied for his PhD and taught at The Jewish Theological Seminary, he has also taught the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs an ongoing seminar, and American Jewish University. Rabbi Brad regularly teaches and consults for the US Army and United States Department of Defense, religious organizations — Jewish and Christian — including United Seminary (Methodist), Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (Modern Orthodox) Luther Seminary (Lutheran), and The Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative) — civic organizations including No Labels, Odyssey Impact, and The Aspen Institute, numerous Jewish Federations, and a variety of communal and family foundations.
Hirschfield is the author and editor of numerous books, including You Don’t Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism, writes a column for Religion News Service, and appears regularly on TV and radio in outlets ranging from The Washington Post to Fox News Channel. He is also the founder of the Stand and See Fellowship, which brings hundreds of Christian religious leaders to Israel, preparing them to address the increasing polarization around Middle East issues — and really all currently polarizing issues at home and abroad — with six words, “It’s more complicated than we know.”