Internal Medicine Associates recently launched a new online Patient Portal. The portal allows for patients to request appointments, view reports, and update personal information-via the internet. Many patients are frantically calling due to concerns with the new digital medical system. My point is that the future of communication, reading, receiving news & information, and even health care notifications are rapidly transferring to the world of digital systems. Jonah Lehrer confirms his fear of the conversion of digital reading within his scientific blog, "The Future of Reading." Lehrer’s begins by expressing his love for reading and fascination with books. In Fahnestock’s article, “The Stases in Scientific and Literary Argument”, Fahnestock states, “scientific articles occupy the first two stases. They are concerned with matters of fact, definitions, and cause.” (432) I will use Fahnestock’s idea of scientific arrangement as a lens for analyzing Lehrer’s article.
Scientific arguments are largely concerned with discovery and matters of fact. In Lehrer’s opening sentence he offers the audience a fact about the movement of digital reading, “I think it’s pretty clear that the future of reading is digital.” He then progresses his argument by stating, “It’s never been easier to buy books, read books, or read about books you might want to buy. How can that not be good?” The second stasis Lehrer’s argument works within is through definition. He examines the different forms of technology and defines their abilities to make reading and perceiving content effortless for the reader. Lehrer’s concern is, “making content easier and easier to see-could actually backfire with books. We will trade away understanding for perception. The words will shimmer on the screen, but the sentences will be quickly forgotten.” He then provides vast methods and explanation for his argument by forwarding researching conducted by neurologist, Shanislas Dehaene. The research he includes offers the explanation that the brain has “two pathways for making sense of words, which are activated in different contexts.” The ventral pathway is activated by familiar passages of prose. The second pathway is the dorsal stream- which is activated when is forced to pay particularly close attention to the sentence. He concludes with a proposal for the future direction of digital reading and e-readers, “we alter the fonts, or reduce the contrast, or invert the monochrome color scheme. Our eyes will need to struggle, and we’ll certainly read slower…We won’t just scan the words-we will contemplate their meaning.”
"The Future of Reading" by Johan Lehrer, The frontal Cortex Science Blog (8 Sept 2010)
I agree with your ideas about the stases in this article. I like that you used evidence from both texts. Who do you think his intended audience is for this article?
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