Take a moment of Upcoming Events that means one thing fiction friday for the rest r of august new fiction premises purchases would be 15 percent off for the frequent Buyer Program next monday we welcome jackie davis and then on the 15h will be in conversation with the book we are doomed now what with essays on war and Climate Change and with labor day just around the corner welcome authors like john kerry Walter Mosley and many others you can learn more about these and Upcoming Events on the website will have time for questions from the audience book tv is here today taping if you didnt notice stand up and speak loudly so they can pick it up. Please note you will be recorded following q a well have a book signing at the table. Reader come home is for sale in the next room and today only 20 percent off that is how we say thank you for buying your book at harvard book store. Your purchase makes tonights event possible so thank you. Also like to thank you in advance and remind you turn off her silence your cell hone for the duration of tonights phone so if you turn those off that would be great. Tonight we are joined by marianne wilkes professor at ucla hunter centering the social justice and is no stranger for many years serving as a professor of citizenship in Public Service and director at the center for reading and Language Development a tough universityy with a fulbright fellowship with the Association Teaching award and cofounded a google literacy initiative. And also to be familiar with the last book since the dawn of time or through the 19 sixties in the digital era phenomenon like text message has entered the lexicon but when it comes to reading there is such a thing as too Much Technology how does reading ona the screen and in the new book reader, home to answer these questions and more for the series of letters and nonfiction how the brains are changing in the digital age. Must read for anybody who spends their day on a computer and raising our world in this world reader come home from the most anticipated but by ompublishers weekly to call it lively ambitious and deeply informative welcome to harvard book store. [applause] thank you so much. I cannot believe i have seen so many friends in five minutes i havent seen you for so long. Would love it if you could sit on the floor. [laughter] those with the dyslexia foundation. [laughter] please follow the example. [laughter] actually im just back from france and the last thing i did is swim in the cold swiss help rivers and i may have lost my voice for my first reading. Occasionally she will read from some quotes from the beginning. But its like if you more like Emily Dickinson that the soul selects her own society. So thats what we are going to do tonight you are a special society i have a fantasy and clearly it is that someday i will come due were reading with my select society to say with the house and was cspan i want to say you did Something Wonderful for me and the people who have hangovers on newew years eve because mine on new years day and all these people who never would have read a thing by me say i remember you. [laughter] so thank you to cspan for doing this tonight. [laughter] i willi actually begin speaking for 35 minutes a former ceo but really word i love about her is the favorite soprano and has agreed to help me read some of the quotes. This is a book of letters because i do not have the last one i have words and people who mightn have worked who is a linguist. All of you who are here a letter that gives an opening and in a certain sense what it does is give me a chance of the best of my thinking and hope that it elicits the best of yours i will read the pieces of the last letter but Thomas Aquinas said iron sharpens iron and that is almost what we are in in a Digital World and we are all progressing in extraordinary ways and it will never be a binary, this discussion and what enables me by the very structure of the book to say we are entering the dilemma of the stagen together and i hope my thoughts but i am just so excited. Thank you. So like you just to begin with a quote the beginning of my last and then i will proceed. Hello everybody. Trevor certain kind of silence that is elusive in that society. It is not contemplation we desire but a distraction masquerading as being in the now with such landscape and cant help but fall prey to illusion albeit that is deeply seductive with the promise that speed can lead us to illumination its more important to react reading is an act ofis contemplation and an act of resistance in the landscape of distraction and returns us to a reckoning of time. And now a letter i need you to realize the book title , this is the second time it got changed. [laughter] it should have been letters to the good leader and you will see why and all of my colleagues know of what i do with dyslexia there are a lot of different meanings to good reader. You are saying i would give gratitude but to the poet but to give homage to a man who through letters tried to give his best to someone he would never know or never meet so in essence my letters are the hope a dialogue can be had with people i will never meet. Here is my dear reader. When i was very young, i thought good reader meant one could read all the books that filled two tiny shelves in a two room schoolhouse. When i began to study that they filled multiple Library Buildings with levels deep under the ground, i thought good reader when matt read as many as possible. And take the knowledge with them when i was young teacher in a place whose teachers had long left my only thought i could not help them become good readers they could never leave the borders of the families indentured lives in hawaii when i first became a researcher when we compare a good readers with those with dyslexia and who worked harder than almost anyone else to understand. Finally when i studied and to retrieve the meanings of word words, i learned that everyone would be activated. That meaning as is discussed in those ethics aristotle wrote a good society has three lives of knowledge andod productivity and entertainment with that particular understanding of leisure, and finally so to i believe are the three lives of the good leader. The first life in gathering information and acquiring knowledge and we are all awash and that life. There is a second life in which most forms of entertainment are found in abundance with the exquisite pleasure of immersion and in articlese about the newly discovered xo planets to steal our breath away. We read to take this, the most economic transport away from our everyday life. The third life is the culmination of reading to determine the other two lives that which in whatever genre we are speaking a private holding where we can contemplate all manners of human existence and those whose real mystery swarm our imagination. Our culture fully embodies aristotles good society but we see each day from that life. So to, i think the third life of the good reader. With that Digital Culture unlike Martin Heidegger that that dimension of human beings by the overwhelming materialism and consumerism and a fractured relationship with time. As Steve Wasserman asked, does the ethos of acceleration diminish our capacity for deliberation and feeble genuine reflection . Does it banish that space needed for actual wisdom . Readers know in their bone something that they forget at their peril that without books and without literacy, the good society vanishes. If we are to evaluate one evaluate the text we must examine ourselves without a cognitive flinch to look at who we area now as readers and co inhabitants of a shared planet. Many changes in our thinking oh as much to our biological reflex so to survive as a culture and to not only stimulate but to survive. We have a novelty bias, and we had to look at all of these. And i am suggesting the changes of our thinking today although not thatre biological reflex to stimulate or to add to the culture with continuous stimulus to the collusion its what we do next with our growing consciousness of these changes that matters whether we exacerbate the negative changes by ignoringno them or redress them with knowledge that this will depend in part on what all of us do next. Whether we are able to attend with this reflection is the epoque is a matter of personall choice with critical implications not only for us oras individuals, but us as citizens. John dunn saw the laws related to the rise of violence and conflict in society. I see it more as an outcome with the constant need for efficiency to buy time without knowing for what purpose decreasing Attention Spans pushed beyond the cognitive limit with distractions and information that will never become knowledge and the increasingly manipulated and superficial uses of knowledge that will never become wisdom. In the first half of the 20th century, t. S. Eliot wrote , where is the wisdom we have lostl in knowledge . Where is the knowledge we have lost it information . In the First Quarter of the century, daily we conflate information with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom with the oesulting minutia of all three. Exemplified by the attractive dynamic with this process , only the allocation of time to the inferential and critical and analytical function can transform information into knowledge that can then be consolidated into memory. Only this eternal life knowledge will draw us and enable us to make analogies and inferences. The discernment of truth and the value of new information depends on our allocation of time to these critical analytic processes. During these moments together you are not done its at least 15 more minutes. [laughter] sorry i ask that you try on with the great writer describes as a rhythm of time that passes with no other aim angela feelings and thought settle down and mature and to use that latin expression which translates into hurry up and he wanted to own one underscore the need to slow down for us. I use it here to help it experience life more consciously knowing how to quiet the guy to allow your thoughts to settle and be still as to be poised for what will follow. I want children to learn the capacity and the cognitive patience. And i ask you all now to reclaim what we all may have lost. To be released from the way most of us including myself now if you can but slowly if you must so to have cognitive patience is to recover a rhythm of time that allows you to attend with consciousness and intention quickly you read until you are conscious. But the thoughts to comprehend the beauty to appreciate, the questions to remember and the insight unto ourselves. Few historical individuals have the life altering importance even under the dire circumstances to describe in my other work one of the most moving books i have everon read laters letters and papers from prison after being thrown into concentration camps from nazi germany what is portrayed and kept alive in very large part by what he could read to himself and that the illustrious family could give him and as revealing as anything to the prison guards. My hope for my children and my childrens children, and yours is that they will know where to find the many forms of joy and the secret hiding places and the reading life and in the sanctuary it gives all of us who seek it. In ant recent essay about the values of our nation, Marilyn Robinson wrote i believe we stand add a threshold and that the example of his light life obliges me to speak about the historical moment as i see it in the knowledge that nosoi society at any time is immune to moral catastrophe. We owe iti to him to acknowledge a bitter lesson healer before us that these challenges could be understood too late. We live in a historical moment. And on route to hold new forms of communication and cognition and choices that are ultimately deeply of the call. Unlike during other great transitions, we have the science and technology and the ethical imagination necessary to understand the challenges wefa face before it is too late if we choose to do so. We need to confront the reality that when we are bombarded with too many options we can rely on information that paid places too few demands upon our thinking. More and more we know something based on information whose source was chosen because it conforms to how and what we thought before. Thus even though we are seemingly well there seems to be less and less motivation for those views that differ from our own we think we know enough that misleading mental state that puts us into a form of passive cognitive complacency that precludes further reflection and opens wide the door for others to think for us. This is a wellknown recipe for intellectual and social neglect and the frame of societal order and this is the ultimate message of the book that any version of the digital chain hypothesis that you have to read the book to understand, sorry. [laughter] poses a threat if we remain unaware. And all the profound implications for the future of a democratic society. The atrophy and gradual disuse of the analytical and respective capacities as individualswo, are the worst enemies ever Truly Democratic Society for whatever reason , in whatever medium. And now my voice is going down. [laughter] the worst atrocities of the h century bear witness tragically to what occurs when Society Fails to examine its own actions to see the analytical powers for those that tell them how to think and what to fear. So to describe this old scenario from the prison cell and wrot wrote, if you look more closely we will see with the political and religious has a folly and a large part of mankind and indeed is a psychological law the power of psalm is the folly of others and of those intellectual capacities is destroyed but the upsurge of power make such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of the independent judgment and actually give up trying to hassess the new state of affairs for themselves to the greatest mistakes of the 21st century therefore would be to ignore that ignore those of the 20th century and failed to evaluate to see the critical and analytical powers and independent judgment to others in society or in our intrusive society. Few people would contest with such diminishment of our faculties. What wouldul be contested is why. I could never imagine to have wonderful colleagues here who do Similar Research and most of which reflect increasing adaptations to a culture withve implications for a democratic society. That is my conclusion. The most important contribution of the invention of written language is a Democratic Foundation for critical and the reflective capacity. This is the basis of a collective conscience. If we in the 21st century are to preserve a vital collective conscience, we asked to be sure all members of our society are able to read and think both deeply and well. I cannot help but to say at least 25 percent of you in this room are working for literacy in some way with some population either here or africa or india or our own backyard. We would fail as a society if we do not educate our children and reeducate all citizenry to the responsibility of each citizen to process information critically and widely acrossme all media and we will fail as a society if we do not recognize that capacity for a reflective reasoning and those us. Disagree with a democracy succeeds only with those aspirations are respected and given voice and they believe this is true regardless of the viewpoint. The great insufficiently discussed danger to society stems not from the expression of different views, but from the failure to ensure that all citizens are educated to use the full intellectual powers informing those views. That which occurs when this is not realized leads to a vulnerability to demagoguery to falsely raise hopes and falsely raised fears that trump reason and the capacity for those receipts along with the influence on that decisionmaking. Most will never become aware of any of this just as i worry with the overreliance on external sources of information that the young will not know what they do not know and i worry equally that we, they are guides do not realize the insidious knowing of her own thinking. That imperceptible shortening of our own Attention Spans through complex issues. The unsuspected diminishing of our own ability to read, write and think past 140 characters. We must all take stock of who we are as readers as writers and as thinkers. Every single one of you. The good readers of the society which detect the presence of danger to its members and our common humanity. The final purpose of the third reading is the ability to transform information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. And with the basis of all truis truism, the combining of the highest intellectual and empathic powers, with our capacity for virtue may well be why it has continued if these capacities are endangered so are we all. If they are supported, children, all of u us, not only will we have the antidote to the weakness of a Digital Culture but achieve to readdress those with the greatest potential into the future and now i have one more page to read and ask to give the quote my favorite one from toni morrison. Its a short one. The future of reading and good readers is the title. She says word work is sublime because it is generative that our human difference and the way we are which no other life that we die, maybe that is the meaning of life but with language could be the measure of our lives. For my first letter to the last these pages celebrate the achievement and in between the pages my hope was to engage in a dialogue with the reader about my concerns first the plasticity of the brain that reflects the characteristics of Digital Media to precipitate the atrophy of our most e essential thought process. Critical analysis and empathy and reflection. To the detriment of the democratic society. Second, will the formation of the same process be in our young who have not acquired the things that all of you have. To be sure that each of these humanhe processes is endangered but each has accelerated across the centuries. We can take comfort from that. But less is to be found in my third concern. So there was a miss in the evolution that the abilities vanished