Garfinkle, founding editor of the American Interest, elaborates on Maryanne Wolf's idea of "deep literacy" from her 2018 book "Reader, Come Home." Garfinkle defines this (or "deep reading") as engagement with "an extended piece of writing" in a way that draws the reader into "a dialectical process with the text." This involves the reader in anticipation of the author's "direction and meaning."
Few scientists doubt that heavy dependency on electronic screens has shortened attention spans. "We know," Garfinkle says, "that prolonged and repetitive exposure to digital devices changes the way we think and behave in part because it changes us physically."
The brain is continuously rewiring itself in response to changing stimuli, and 200,000 years of evolution did not suit it to process today's torrents of fleeting stimuli.
"More items vie for our attention in a given hour," Garfinkle says, "than our ancestors had to handle in a day or even a week." Becoming comfortable with shallow attention to everything, people become transfixed by the present, unable to remember, or to plan well. He reports that high school guidance counselors say most students lack the social skills to speak one-on-one with college admissions personnel. This, Garfinkle believes, reflects "acquired social autism."
People immersed in digital torrents acquire "self-inflicted attention deficits." They become incapable of the "quality attention" that deep literacy requires. Such literacy is, in evolutionary terms, a recent innovation that changed brain circuitry. Garfinkle says, "We are or become, cognitively speaking, what we do with language." Printed words, presented sequentially in sentences and paragraphs, are demanding, but rewarding: Only they can present the reasoning required to establish complicated truths.
Garfinkle's surmise is that government's problem-solving failures reflect not just hyper-partisanship and polarization but the thin thinking of a political class of non-deep readers who are comfortable only with the shallowness of tweets. Instantaneous digital interactions encourage superficiality, insularity and tribalism.
Deep reading, like deep writing, is difficult, hence unnatural. It is unpleasant to those who, tethered to their devices, have become accustomed to lives that are surface straight through. Garfinkle worries that "cognitively sped-up and multitasking young brains may not acquire sufficient capacities for critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy, and hence will become easy prey for charlatans and demagogues."
