Chipspeak

As a person assigned responsibility for developing the strategic vision of the University’s access to the world’s digital resources, I read with interest yesterday’s report in the Chronicle of Higher Education of an industry-sponsored study about overall inability of available bandwidth to meet demand in coming years. The Chronicle cites concerns from some readers of the Nemertes Research study (you have to create an account to view it) that it is really a subtle strategy to bolster the campaign of the major sponsoring companies for relief from government regulation.

Anyone keeping track of these issues at colleges and universities is likely to have a couple of other thoughts. First, the companies involved have poor histories of recognizing the shape of the Internet-related market with any effective foresight. It is likely that the companies are promoting this study for their own political purposes with respect to deregulation, but that doesn’t make the study’s revelations less interesting or important, in my view.

Second, our colleges and universities are microcosms that demonstrate the ultimate point. Few have sufficient resources to build to anticipated demand (even if we are smart enough to see it coming) — because of the explosive growth of demand, nearly all of us are simply reacting to the pressures of demands already present. Our motives and “drivers” may be different, but the results are the same: demand outstripping supply with disturbing regularity. We are all victims of the accuracy of the predictions from years ago by networking futurists about the convergence of data, video, telephony and other flows of information. If we expect to tap those flows effectively in the future, we’ll have to a much better job than we have to date of investing in capacity-building ahead of demand.

The subtitle for this, my first blogpost, should probably be “The New Disability: An Evaporating Capacity to Engage Complex (or Even Just Lengthy) Texts.” The folks who work with me have heard me worry about this notion for some time now, and a recent Chronicle link drove the point home for me. The Chronicle story is titled “Americans are Closing the Book on Reading, Study Finds.” The study is by the National Endowment for the Arts, and can be read in its entirety here.

I won’t bore you with the details, and there’s plenty of reading yet for me to do in this report (small joke), but the implication that should give us alarm in academe is clear: everyone is reading less, and college-educated people are reading less in ways that suggest they are not models for succeeding generations to emulate in countering the trend. What does this mean for scholarship as we know it? I have some ideas, but that’s for some later discussion.

The point that interests me most today is this one: although it is clear in the report that “traditional” reading is competing poorly for the focus of our nation’s eyeballs when compared to other media, analysis of the elements of attraction in those other media rarely mentions something that I’d suggest may be critical. Reading as normally practiced is an isolated, individual activity. The activities that are really exploding in usage by the teenagers and young adults I see are group-based and community-oriented, practiced in a context of social networks. Can “authentic” reading take place in such a context?

Thanks to Martha, I’ve gotten a hint about the answer. BookGlutton.com is a beta site (and it really is beta, so don’t expect everything to work perfectly) through which readers can read books (at least those in the public domain) via a pleasant interface, annotate for their own use (if they choose), but also read in groups with shared annotation and real-time chat about what they’re reading. As currently laid out, it isn’t completely clear how to get access, but if you look at the top of this page, you’ll see a box to enter your e-mail address and a checkbox to receive the newsletter. That’s where you start.

After some struggles to get the authentication for my account to work properly, I’m in, and I’m intrigued at the possibilities. Does this offer an answer to the decline of engaged reading? I’m not sure, but I think it is on the right exploratory track because it starts from the assumption that reading can be a live, real-time social experience. I’m betting future generations will discover that a lifelong love of reading can indeed start in that context. As in most things, look to the kids themselves. They’ll show us the answer, if we’re smart enough to see it.

UPDATE: 11/20/07 — Amazon’s introduction of the “Kindle” today means that lots of folks are discussing this topic in real time. WBUR is broadcasting an interesting discussion that includes Steven Levy, author of a Newsweek story on this subject, and Sven Bikerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. So far, the discussion has touched on the difference between individual reading and “group” reading, with concern expressed (I believe it was from Bikerts) about the homogenization (my term, not his) of thinking that results from a group reading experience.

UPDATE: 12/4/07 — This week’s Chronicle Review contains a point-of-view piece by the University of Maryland’s Matthew Kirschenbaum that captures what I wish I had said above very effectively:  “How Reading is Being Reimagined.”