Guest Post: John Fruner in response to Reading/Writing v. Listening/Talking

Your recent post, Online Learning: Reading/Writing v. Listening/Talking, struck a chord with my limited experience as an educator, but also with my experiences as a student and in the workplace. You're on to something here, and I hope to learn some solutions and ideas from your book, at least as far as the virtual classroom is concerned.

I've often seen coworkers, fellow students, and students in an undergraduate course I taught who seemed surprisingly uncomfortable with reading and writing. It almost always seemed they were highly capable people in every other way. For some reason I could not imagine, however, they either lacked the patience or the ability (very likely both, since the two are connected) to read or write more than very short messages. I began noticing this well before Twitter made instant communication a virtual world consisting entirely of messages of 140 characters or less with optional hyperlinks to more information.

Technology has helped us package more language information content in smaller and smaller packages ever since signaling methods allowed us to communicate where talking was not useful. With telegraph, telephone, and radio, we very gradually learned how to compress our communication to minimize our cost to use those technologies, and we adjusted to communicating without nonverbal signaling. When the Internet, email, and the early forms of instant messaging and SMS technology on our pocket devices arrived, we increased our capacity for short bursts of viewable keyboard-and-screen communication. Entertainment media provided so many choices to which we could devote our limited viewing time for reading and writing messages of any length. On our mobile phones, spoken communication still thrived, but reading and writing slipped into the background.

Technology also led to information overload, a factor in this context. At some point, I began to see people making choices to prioritize communication in such a way that reading and writing went to the bottom of the priority list. People stopped replying to carefully written messages, began telling others they would rather call than read a message or write one, and seemed to think it was acceptable to completely ignore written communication of any kind. They were perhaps confronted with so much written communication that it became like the sound of the freight train that passes the same house ten times every day--it became part of the background noise of their lives and disappeared from their conscious awareness.

What was lost in this transition is that new forms of communication are intrusive and demanding in their own ways. Deprived of the option to read and write when time allows, people react continuously to new messages, and must move quickly past them to make themselves available for the next new message, so messages going in either direction, incoming or outgoing, must be short, regardless of the subject. By choice or expectation, there is no time when people can claim to be so absorbed in what is increasingly perceived as the "luxury" of reading or writing long messages that they are unavailable for the next incoming message blast. The other key disadvantage of the new order is that almost all professional work includes some portion of its content that requires considerable attention to detail, consistency in processes, and retention of knowledge, all of which are compromised when the predominant method of communication consists of short and ephemeral messages.

A parallel to this phenomenon is the familiar difference in behavior and preferences between action-oriented people and those who are more sedentary in their daily work. Action-oriented people have always needed to make difficult, and sometimes impossible, adjustments to fit into a sedentary occupation. A corporate coworker once quipped that when people change jobs from being out in the operations part of an enterprise to the headquarters, essentially from a field job to a desk job, the first thing they have to be able to learn is "the ability to sit for long periods without resting." The same would be true for military personnel moving from battlefield conditions to desk jobs back home. Often, such people lack the patience, attention span, and emotional capacity for extended communications, and in some cases they find it impossible to learn these abilities.

Considering all this, it is thus little wonder that people at work or in a classroom of any kind are losing touch with the capacity for reading more than they can comprehend at a glance, and writing more than they can see on the small screen of a mobile phone. As you point out, this has created a huge and growing skills gap between those with and without the capability to read and write "for long periods without resting." 

I value reading and writing for the advantages I strongly believe they offer. I feel fortunate to have acquired an affinity for them at an early age. For those reasons, I will always try to promote reading and writing skills among any students I have the opportunity to teach. I look forward to reading your book and reading more of your insights on this important subject. Keep up your good work!

John Fruner

Orion, Michigan