Skimmy-Dipping

I have become a skimmy-dipper. Whether it's Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, ESPN, Bleacher Report, RELEVANT, Runner's World, CNN, Fox, NPR, blogs, student work, etc., I skim. If I'm honest, I skim because reading (and my purpose for reading) has become all about me and my interests and my time and my instant gratification and my evidence-seeking-to-back-my-opinions kind of reading.

I didn't think twice about skimmy-dipping until I came across an article that appeared in The Guardian titled, Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound by Maryanne Wolf. Wolf makes some thought-provoking claims that have serious implications not only for my classroom but for society as a whole. In it she writes:

The possibility that critical analysis, empathy and other deep reading processes could become the unintended “collateral damage” of our digital culture is not a simple binary issue about print vs digital reading. It is about how we all have begun to read on any medium and how that changes not only what we read, but also the purposes for why we read. Nor is it only about the young. The subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy affects us all. It affects our ability to navigate a constant bombardment of information. It incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and demagoguery.

The idea that the collateral damage in our world for this new habit could potentially harm our ability to deeply read and empathize with those around us alarms me. Not only that, but she also begins to make the case for the importance of physically holding texts in our hands because "human beings need a knowledge of where they are in time and space that allows them to return to things and learn from re-examination – what he calls the “technology of recurrence." 

I love the addition of ed-tech. It has, in many ways, made me more effective as an educator. But as MIT scholar Sherry Turkle reveals, "We do not err as a society when we innovate, but when we ignore what we disrupt or diminish while innovating." So I'm curious what, if anything, are we disrupting or diminishing in our classrooms with the addition of ed-tech? 

We are becoming a society of skimmy-dippers.  And honestly, who doesn't like a good skimmy-dip once-in-a-while? But if there is merit to the thinking in this article, we must not ignore what we might be leaving behind. 

Cheers.