William Barry
9/25/18
ENG-151
The media we use is to help further develop our ability to read and comprehend. Paul La Farge is an American novelist, essayist and academic; he graduated from Yale University and has taught writing at Wesleyan University on and off since 2002. As of 2017, La Farge has published five novels, his most positive critically acclaimed being Haussmann. In La Farge’s article “The Deep Space of Digital Reading”, he presents the idea of how internet can be used to help further our ability to read.
La Farge’s article was published by a science magazine known as Nautilus. Nautilus is a magazine that reports “on a single monthly topic from multiple perspectives”(Nautilus). While the magazines primary audience is people who have an interest with science, La Farge’s audience are people that like to read; both electronically and on paper. The target audience are young to middle aged adults that enjoy reading. And with the way technology progresses, these readers are finding new ways to entertain their time physically and virtually.
The article’s main claim is about the resourcefulness that digital technology presents to the reading brain(The Deep Space of Digital Reading, La Farge). Digital technology “has the potential to expand and augment the very contemplative space that we have prized in ourselves ever since we learned to read” instead of crippling it(The Deep Space of Digital Reading, La Farge). La Farge supports this claim by providing historical examples and studies, some of the studies that he presents are also used in other articles concerned with the same topic of digital reading. One of these studies was conducted by a person known as Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid and director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University. In the study Wolf found that the brain’s limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotions, plays a role in a person as they learn to read and continue reading(The Deep Space of Digital Reading, Wolf). This is why some people can’t put down a good book or lose track of time as they read because they’ve immersed themselves into a novel.
Now, this article was published back in January of 2016. Since then there have been more studies done that would support or counter the articles claim. There’s also one other issue regarding the date of the article as well as it’s publication. As previously mentioned the article was published in 2016, but it was published in a science magazine that updates topics in its physical version weekly and its digital version hourly. This being the case, a person could say that there are more recent articles with more up to date studies and research conducted in comparison to La Farge’s. However, it’s also important to mention where the article is listed under in it’s publication: Neuroscience. This is the science of the mind, and while studies are done on the mind often they are not usually conducted on the same topic. With this knowledge, one can make the claim that this article is a very reliable and up to date source.
Although it could be considered out of date, La Farge wrote the article in a way that informatively persuades the audience that digital reading is a good thing. He gives the readers details of how he reads as well as a thought provoking theory for the future of digital reading.
La Farge’s main goal of this article was to persuasively inform young to middle aged adults that hold an interest in reading the advantages of digital reading. He makes supports his claims with studies and historical examples that hold similar concern as the ones addressed in the article.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xbrn32numuaru5d/assignment.mp4?dl=0