As novas gerações ou o "Pesadelo de Sócrates"
A preocupação é expressa por Maryanne Wolf, no
International Herald Tribune, de quinta-feira passada, ao questionar-se "como é que a imersão num mundo cada vez mais digital configurará a relação da próxima geração com a leitura, a aprendizagem e com o próprio conhecimento".
Porquê "pesadelo"?
"As a cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading, I am particularly concerned with the plight of the reading brain as it encounters this technologically rich society. Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realize that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips. Over the last 5,000 years, the acquisition of reading transformed the neural circuitry of the brain and the intellectual development of the species. Yet, the reading brain is slowly becoming endangered - the unforeseen consequences of the transition to a digital epoch that is affecting every aspect of our lives, including the intellectual development of each new reader".
Porquê Sócrates?
"At the core of Socrates' arguments lay his concerns for the young. He believed that the seeming permanence of the printed word would delude them into thinking they had accessed the heart of knowledge, rather than simply decoded it. To Socrates, only the arduous process of probing, analyzing and ultimately internalizing knowledge would enable the young to develop a lifelong approach to thinking that would lead them ultimately to wisdom, virtue and 'friendship with [their] god'. To Socrates, only the examined word and the "examined life" were worth pursuing, and literacy short-circuited both. How many children today are becoming Socrates' nightmare, decoders of information who have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond their googled universes? Will they become so accustomed to immediate access to escalating on-screen information that they will fail to probe beyond the information given to the deeper layers of insight, imagination and knowledge that have led us to this stage of human thought? Or, will the new demands of information technologies to multitask, integrate and prioritize vast amounts of information help to develop equally, if not more valuable, skills that will increase human intellectual capacities, quality of life and collective wisdom as a species?"
Para esta especialista, "[c]hildren need to have both time to think and the motivation to think for themselves, to develop an expert reading brain, before the digital mode dominates their reading. The immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge".
Uma posição que se pretende distanciada quer dos apologistas quer dos detrractores do digitalismo é a do sociólogo espanhol Enrique Gil Calvo que, no jornal El País se pergunta: "
Quién teme al hipertexto feroz?". Para ele "la educación sentimental de los menores de la e-generación está guiada por el influjo de la lectura digital, y ya no por el espíritu de la lectura impresa como se cree que sucedía con las generaciones previas. Y al decir de los oráculos, ese cambio educativo ejercerá consecuencias decisivas, venturosas para los panglosianos que ensalzan las virtudes mágicas del digitalismo, desastrosas para los agoreros que denuncian sus vicios perversos. Pues aunque unos lo interpreten como un impacto providencial y los otros catastrófico, tecnófilos y tecnófobos coinciden en atribuir una importancia desmedida al cambio de soporte lector, sin que se les haya ocurrido que estemos ante otro caso de vino viejo en odres nuevos."
(Imagem: "Mulher a ler", Pablo Picasso, 1935)
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