The internet isn't harming our love of 'deep reading', it's cultivating it
“This alleged ADHD generation, as well as its elders who have been sucked in to the internet lifestyle, may be responsible for the human species losing its "deep-reading brain”. At least that is the worry expressed by a group of writers and neuroscientists calling themselves the Slow Reading Movement.
“In our culture of excitable neuroscientisma lot of such arguments employ the sexy word "brain” and so sound scientifically objective, but they are really socio-cultural arguments. No doubt there are many kinds of task-specific neural developments (ie “brain” types) that have been lost in the mists of evolutionary time, and whose absence we have no reason to regret. Not many people in advanced industrial societies today, for example, grow up developing the mental skills required to kill tasty large mammals with a well-hurled spear. But we don’t read hand-wringing stories about how we have lost the antelope-hunting brain. So there needs to be a further demonstration that the “deep-reading brain” is something worth valuing. And this is never going to be a (neuro)scientific argument; it’s a cultural argument.“