On February 7th, Steven Johnson criticized the NEA's recent report about declining rates of reading because he says they ignored reading on computer screens (Link: Dawn of the digital natives, The Guardian). It turns out he was wrong, as Sunil Iyengar and Mark Bauerlein of the NEA write in the Guardian today: There is good reason to be worried about declining rates of reading. Excerpts:
Steven Johnson diminished the significance of reading problems in the Britain and the United States, and misrepresented our research into the issue. His biggest error was to assert that "in almost every study [the US National Endowment for the Arts] cites, screen-based reading is excluded from the data."
He goes further, accusing our report of "simply excising screen-based reading". In fact, the majority of the report's data on reading derives from large population studies asking people how frequently they read anything whatsoever for pleasure - a category so broad as to include text of any length in any format through any medium, from books to cereal boxes to, yes, computer screens.
For example, in 2004 the US department of education asked 17-year-olds "How often do you ... read for fun on your own time?" With no limitation specified on where or how this reading was done, 19% replied "Never or hardly ever", more than double the 1984 rate of 9%. This is hardly an outcome to dismiss.
[...]
Johnson denies there is any evidence of damage linked with excessive viewing and surfing. Yet sufficient data has led the American Academy of Pediatrics to advise parents to keep children's rooms free of electronic media. Reading is at risk, but so are the minds of the young; we need a more critical view of their digital environment and its omnipresent allure. Now is the time for educators and intellectuals to produce sound empirical studies of the risks and benefits of electronic media.
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