Sustaining the culture of the book: the role of enrichment reading and critical thinking in the undergraduate curriculum - The Library and Undergraduate Education

Popular laments like Boorstin's (1987) The Image and Postman's (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death describe the decline in values and reasoning in a media-dominated culture. Postman attributes the breakdown in cultural values to the media-induced decline in critical reasoning. Electronic media appear to have irreversibly changed the character of our symbolic environment in a culture whose information, ideas, and epistemology are given form by television and not by the printed word. Print is the hero; image is the villain because it does not require higher order abstract thinking (Lanham, 1993, p. 237). But Lanham argues for a distinction between mass media and the emerging digital environment: "We should not confuse this narcotizing of American society, horrible as it is, with the mixture of word, image, and sound emerging now through digital multimedia techniques (p. 201). Kernan (1990) and Hardison (1989) argue that electronic technology has destroyed the print-centered product we think of as literature along with the book-centered culture it created. But Bolter (1991) again takes a far more optimistic view of the ability of electronic technology to offer us a new kind of book and new ways to write and read, "a fourth great technique of writing that will take its place beside the ancient papyrus roll, the medieval codex, and printed book" (p. 6), suggesting "in fact, hypermedia is the revenge of text upon television.... In television, text is absorbed into the video image, but in hypermedia the televised image becomes part of the text" (p. 26).

Ulmer (1989) urges a positive response by schools to what may be a profound change in the process of conceptual thinking in an image and electronic culture, suggesting that schools participate in the invention of a new style of conceptual thought. He challenges educators to learn how to write and think electronically--in a way that "supplements without replacing" analytical reason. One essential paradox in any current examination of the issues at hand-namely the optimism expressed for electronic text-is that the analysis reflects an experience of print literacy that an electronic generation will lack. What will happen "to future generations of students who differ from Lanham, Landow, and Bolter in not having spent the first forty years of their lives mining the base cognitive and psychological resources of print literacy. Those future generations may lack training in literate reason, linear argument, left brain conceptualization" (Tuman, 1992, p. 80).

But more recent analysis (Forsberg, 1993) offers some insights on helping students develop critical and higher order thinking in an image culture. Arguing that responsible education must teach children how to assess the image world in which they find themselves and how to evaluate the messages bombarding them on a daily basis, Forsberg warns that educators do not yet know how to teach students to think critically about this enigmatic" world (p. ix). Recognizing that a major factor behind this cultural transformation is the shift in our dominant forms of communication-the movement away from a print-based culture toward an image-immersed culture-forsberg warns that the television age may produce a new generation of people whose only vision of reality is the fragmented distorted image. She pinpoints the essential curricular challenge: