1．
The article’s main question is, are books superior to TV? Its proposed answer is that “they affect our brains differently, according to science.” An initial quibble about “according to science”: the attitude contained in these words is itself not a scientific attitude to take towards the appeal to scientific evidence. There may be studies that support the author’s conclusion, but a great deal more scrutiny must be given to any piece of scientific evidence before we can definitively say on which side of an argument it falls (I can say this with a bit more confidence when we consider that the article I am examining is very short and so unlikely to contain that level of scrutiny). That caveat having been stated, I continue reading.
The author begins by framing the question in a way I find very compelling: why would it be better for you to read A Game of Thrones than to watch it? This has all the appearance of an experiment: the content is controlled and only the form is changed. What about the form, then, makes the difference?
(Interestingly, the article itself, as presented, provides us with a case study: we have on the one hand the author’s words and on the other a video summarizing her argument. I wonder whether the person who reads the article will end up gaining a better appreciation of the author’s argument than the person who watches the video based upon it.)
The author appeals to a study that examined the differences between children who watched more TV and children who read more books. According to the study, the brains of the children who spent more time watching TV and less time reading books changed in ways that suggested they might have become more aggressive and also would now reason more poorly. To corroborate the latter observation, these children did more poorly on tests of verbal ability. Another study complements the first by showing positive changes in the brains of college students after reading a novel. Other studies are cited to show further benefits.
Unfortunately, the author doesn’t stop to analyze possible weaknesses in the studies, nor does she report on whether the studies received any significant criticisms. Without more research, it’s hard for me to know how much support the studies provide for the claim being advanced. Further, the studies seem to get away from the question with which we began, which is whether, controlling for the content, the form makes a difference.
(Possible problems with the studies: what about children who spent equal amounts of time watching TV and reading books? Were economic and social differences, not to mention initial cognitive differences, controlled for? What kinds of tests were administered, and are they accurate measures of verbal ability? Were the differences very significant, or is it only that children who watched more TV showed slight verbal deficits? The latter point I think is very important. If differences emerge, but they are not very significant, we have no reason to become very worried. A similar point comes to mind when I hear claims about group differences in IQ: one group might score 10 points lower on IQ tests than another, but are there any skills that members of the former group, on average, would not be able to acquire as opposed to those of the latter? Your having an IQ ten points lower or higher than someone else does not necessarily mean that one of you, as opposed to the other, will be unable to learn how to program computers or perform surgery, I would think. Here we have the same point: one group of children might end up being more advanced, verbally, than the other, but will the distinction be so pronounced as to make a substantive differnence?)
Going back to the example of A Game of Thrones, what we really need to show is that readers display greater engagement with and understanding of content than viewers. In testing this claim, I would want to control for many variables: I would want to make sure that the readers and viewers spent roughly the same amount of time with their respective media. I would want to ensure, in case we were testing changes to verbal ability, that the two groups had been exposed to roughly the same amount of language.
Why? Because if it takes someone 20 hours to read the first novel in a series but only say 12 hours to watch its televised form – and if, in the course of those 20 hours, they are exposed to say 1,000,000 words while the TV watcher is exposed only to 100,000, then it seems unfair to expect that the person who watched TV learned as much as the person who read the book. Of course if you spend more time with more words you are likely to expand your vocabulary and whatnot. We want to see whether a person exposed to the same number of words for the same amount of time via reading or television benefits more from one or the other.
Someone might think there is a good explanation for why books are better for verbal ability than television shows: in general, the number of words a reader is exposed to per hour are greater than the number of words a viewer is exposed to per hour. That in turn provides a foundation for the claim that reading is better for developing verbal ability than watching television. But note the limits of what will be established: TV only ends up being a less efficient mode of delivery than books. This doesn’t tend to establish any superiority over words in written form, without images, to words in spoken form with images.
(Let us also consider whether readers as opposed to viewers have an easier time learning the meaning of words from context. We forget how much a visual aid can do to make the meaning of unfamiliar terms clear.)
2.
The article next sets out to try and explain why reading is better than watching TV. The author begins by citing another study to the effect that toddlers who read a book with their mothers communicated with them more often and at a higher level of quality than those who did not: “Mothers were more likely to ask their child[ren] questions, respond to their child[ren]’s statements and questions, and explain concepts in greater detail” (~50%).
Strictly speaking, the results of this study can only directly testify to the quantity and not the quality of the communication, but the inference to quality is reasonable. Another problem with drawing a general moral about reading versus watching from this study is that most reading is done silently and alone, not with a parent who encourages the reader to answer and ask questions. Again, for parity, one would have to compare the results of watching a TV program about which one frequently conversed – or one would have to look at what happened when mothers frequently stopped a TV show and discussed it with their children.
This last observation is important, because the moral the author draws from the study is TV is essentially “passive”: you ‘switch to your show, sit back, and watch without effort’. TV also presents characters and events “on a surface level,” without “the luxury of describing or explaining situations in great detail” – they need to keep viewers “visually entertained” and are “fast paced” for fear of losing them. Whereas the primary form of exposition in television shows is “dialog,” the narrative featured in books is more critical and involved – it is “commentary.”
This last paragraph is the key for the article’s argument. The scientific studies are suggestive, but the ideas stated here are the motor of the argument. Unfortunately, they also look like a priori assumptions (prejudices). I’m afraid it might require a great deal of thought and investigation to evaluate them, but I will try to discuss them in turn.
1. “Watching is passive; reading is active.”
I often hear this claim. I suppose we think it takes more effort to derive words from letters, on the one hand, and to supply a reference for those words from our imagination. (This of course involves the assumption that we must actively imagine something in order to understand the word that refers to it.)
There is an additional assumption that what takes greater mental effort is better for the mind – that is, what is harder for the mind makes it smarter (“mental aerobics”).
It is true that a visual supplies some of the referent and context for us when we watch television, so to that extent I suppose we do have to work harder to supply these when we read (if we must supply them at all – see above); however, language is by its nature abstract and universal, so we are just as likely to have to supply missing information and imagine what is absent in order to understand spoken dialog as we are in order to understand written narration.
We also forget, because extracting information from visual stimulae comes so naturally to us, that a picture must be “read” just as well as words. In what the camera shows us we find hundreds or thousands of details almost instantaneously that invite us to infer, predict, and remember. This brings me to a second point.
2. “Words are more intellectual than pictures.”
This is a very important assumption behind every examination of print versus television. It is for this reason too that we look down on picture books and believe a person has not really begun to read until her books have no illustrations. (It puts me to mind of the beginning of Alice and Wonderland, in which Alice is put out because her sister’s books contain neither pictures nor – see above – dialog.)
Now this is a deeper and more philosophical proposition, of Platonic provenance, and it may even be true to some extent, but the examination of it would take us very far afield. Be that as it may, I think that pictures are often an invaluable supplement to words. The presence or absence of pictures can make all the difference to our understanding. It is likely that people who read, in the absence of pictures, will misinterpret what they read for lack of just such an aid.
For example, many books contain detailed descriptions of a character’s appearance or apparel. My vocabulary and imagination in these areas are very weak, so I think that I do not derive a very deep understanding of what the author wants to communicate about his character from these passages. I must derive an infinitely more subtle appreciation of a character when I can see as opposed to having to suffer through the tedium of reading about her appearance.
You may say that having to work through these descriptions is exactly what makes reading better intellectual exercise – but in fact I, and I imagine most readers, do not work through these descriptions. We just read through them without understanding and get on to the portions of the book that we do understand.
(There is a passage at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings about Bilbo's family tree; I did not learn from reading this passage anything about his parentage -- I simply skipped past all the references to second- and third-cousins once-removed until I arrived at the entrance of Gandalf. If a reader does not want to pause and thoroughly engage with what she is reading, in the absence of a teacher, no one will make her.)
If we take it as a given that readers and viewers will only expend a certain amount of mental effort to understand what they are consuming in normal circumstances, it begins to look like the same amount of cognitive investment will yield a far greater dividend in the case of TV than in the case of reading. Reading is the equivalent of going to the theater blind – you cannot expect the reader will attain the same level of understanding as the person who both hears and sees.
3. “Television is entertaining; reading is educational.”
It may be that reading is far more instructional than seeing and hearing (though, if this is true, it will be an indictment of much of our higher education). But to make this claim is to abandon the control of content which the article took as its initial premise. If we’re going to consider which has more cognitive benefit, we have to consider reading and viewing both primarily for the sake of entertainment. We may do this in accordance with the author’s plan: won’t the author say that reading ends up always or for the most part delivering instruction in addition to entertainment, and in greater quantities? I don’t quite know how to respond to this, because there’s something unfair about it, if not logically, then in spirit: we are begrudged, for example, the entertainment of reading A Game of Thrones, which is redeemed because at the very least we might expand our vocabulary or deepen our appreciation of syntax.
To continue and conclude: what is finally unfair, I suppose, is the feeling that the claim has now been shifted. One has picked out beforehand as cognitively valuable precisely those features and skills that reading as a media is best suited to deliver (syntactic complexity, which is much more difficult to express in a temporal than a spatial – that is an auditory than a visual linguistic system; reasoning; variety of register and vocabulary). One then notices that television cannot deliver these and effectively and concludes that reading is superior. All the empirical studies are besides the point, because the real work is being done by these a priori assumptions.
But these assumptions miss out on the reason the majority people are reading and watching television in the first place – to be entertained. The purpose of entertainment is not to improve yourself or anything except release and enjoyment. Criticizing different forms of entertainment for what they are not meant as entertainment to do is a dreary enterprise.
My own feeling is that we give entertainment the place it is due in our lives (easier said than done) and not try to assuage our guilt by half measures: “I’m reading A Game of Thrones instead of watching it, so I’m actually being somewhat productive.”
If mental work is requisite to health and development, then by all means do mental work – but save your energy for something really valuable, like studying Calculus, and don’t waste valuable capital working through a novel when all you want is to entertain yourself.
– But of course, novels, television, games, and sports are all entertaining in their own ways, and we vary our entertainments not because we feel one is healthier than another, but because we have the intuition that exclusive focus on this past-time at the expense of some other is narrow-minded and obsessive.
There is a discussion to be had about the most balanced way to enjoy one’s leisure, in short, but it is not to be confused by the mindset according to which we must maximize our productivity and improvement in whatever we do. There is a whiff about any article of this kind that our leisure activities should be an extension of the self-improvement and profit we seek from our vocation – which I believe is nonsense! But to argue that would require another long essay.
Comments
Post a Comment