Putting aside the obvious logical fallacy of this theory for now, I want to concentrate instead on how The Future of Reading is (and is not) scientific. In order to prove and disprove this analysis, I will use Ramage’s Rhetoric and Persuasion II: The Stases and Toulmin. The six questions are ‘what is this thing (definition)’, ‘how much is this thing like/unlike that thing (comparison)’, ‘why did this thing happen (casual)’, ‘how good or bad is this thing (evaluative)’, ‘is this good (ethically)’, and ‘what should we do about this thing (proposal)’ (Ramage, 102-120).
Lehrer does not use all of these questions in his article. He first ignores the definitional stasis and does not define what he means by “reading”. To an English student, reading, at the most basic level is the exchange and absorption of information. To a neuroscientist, reading can be seen as the ability to recognize written characters on a page. Because Lehrer does not define what he means by reading, his hypothesis is unclear. He does answer the resemblance question when he goes to state how like/unlike a book is to an e-reader. To Lehrer, books are solid, old, and harder to read. E-readers are small, new, and “bright and clear” (Lehrer, 1). He also answers the casual question of why e-readers were invented; with the advancement of technology and HD screens, e-readers were inevitable.
As for the next question, the evaluative question, he seems to answer it, but because he failed to answer the definitive question, it seems superficial and incomplete. He claims that e-readers are bad because they make content clearer and therefore forgettable (if we use our ventral pathways), but since he failed to define what reading is, I cannot rely on his definition of bad and good. He vaguely touches on the ethical question, “we’ll become so used to the mindless clarity of e-ink…that the technology will feedback onto the content, making us less willing to endure harder texts” (Lehrer, 2). He does answer the proposal question, but half-heartedly. He says that bad handwriting is the only way to exercise our use of the dorsal path and “perhaps we need to alter the fonts, or reduce the contrast, or invert the monochrome color screen” (Lehrer, 2).
Overall, Lehrer’s article falls just short of being scientific because with his failure to define what reading or deep reading is, I cannot follow the rest of his arguments well. One stasis question leads to another, and if the first question is unanswered, the rest are just ink on a page. As for his proposal that making text less clear would make people concentrate harder, it’s completely unfounded and ridiculous. If this theory were true, reading would have died out with the invention of the printing press, or the word processor. Ramage makes a comment on how in ethical arguments, consequences are also taken into account and some “consenquentialists” only look at consequences, such as “the drinking of caffeinated beverages…will lead to heroin addiction” (Ramage, 116). With his hypothesis that making text clearer will make reading less memorable, Lehrer can now be seen as a consequetialist.
Bibliography
Lehrer, Jonah. “The Future of Reading.” The Frontal Cortext Science Blog.
Ramage, John D. “Rhetoric and Persuasion II: The Stases and Toulmin.” In Rhetoric: A User’s Guide. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2006. 102-120 (excerpts).
