More Thinking about the Series YA Novel

So, Nicholas Carr has a new book out on what the Internet does to our brains ("The Shallows"), and in it he says screen reading and its inherent skimming, linking, and multitasking is undermining our ability to focus and immerse in what Carr calls "deep reading": A large part of what it means to be human, Carr writes, is our capacity for "deep reading," an ability bestowed on us by Gutenberg's printing press, which fostered an "intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration." Deep reading, which requires "sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object," has for ages allowed people to make "their own associations, draw their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas." The Internet works against this, Carr writes, and as a result we're becoming numb, less human, shallow, knowledge jugglers (from NPR review). (I'm thinking "The Shallows" would make a great non-fiction pairing with Patrick Ness's "The Knife of Never Letting Go" or M.T. Anderson's "Feed").

BUT what to make of this in light of supposed Internet-addicted teens' love of series novels? (see more on teens' love of series YA fiction here). Series novels require commitment and focus, immersion, longitudinal reading--isn't this "deep reading?" I mean, hello, remember those books about Harry Potter?? I don't remember seeing copies of those on the discount table at B&N. And look at how those Internet-addicted teens have actually appropriated the Internet to continue and sustain their interaction with Rowling's fiction: There's MuggleNet, there's a Harry Potter wiki, and there used to be an online newspaper called "The Daily Prophet," but not sure what its status is now (looks like it's been re-appropriated by Warner Brothers??).

I kinda wish screen reading/Internet culture critics would quit dichotomizing reading processes into screen reading vs. print-based or traditional reading. Why always pit the two against each other? They're not the same thing: we read books and e-books differently and for different reasons than we read websites on the Internet--all reading, just different. When will we get to a point where we talk about and celebrate the multiple and varied ways we read rather than try to pigeon-hole reading in increasingly narrow, limiting ways? Why be all doom and gloom about the new ways of reading that new Internet technologies require? It's kind of ironic: Internet reading critics and nay-sayers would have us be illiterate to save literacy. Ha! I crack myself up.