For as long as humans have been developing new technology, we've been worrying that our inventions will cause our brains to decay.
Even the development of writing was seen as a threat to the memory skills that enabled ancient poems to be passed from teller to teller - many scholars believe Homer's epics weren't written by a single man, but were the product of a long tradition of oral poetry. Arguably civilisation gained something better in exchange, but there were still those who bemoaned the loss of the memory skills of the oral culture; in Mary Renault's novel The Praise Singer, master-memoriser Simonides worries that his student's memory will become hazy because he is writing things down.
There are some signs that we may be approaching a similar cultural moment, although perhaps with fewer reasons to be cheerful. Reading has been on the decline for the past half-century - largely, it seems, because television has replaced reading in our leisure time. I love television: even with the slew of boring reality shows currently broadcast, TV still offers some very enriching cultural experiences. But the loss of reading - that is, not purely literacy but reading for pleasure - could have wide cultural implications. Reading brings with it a host of other skills and benefits, the loss of which would leave our society poorer, including the ability to absorb information quickly, to think through complex problems or to compare points of view.
And it's not just television that poses a threat to reading, it's the internet too. Of course, using the internet certainly demands literacy. But reading on the internet isn't the same as reading a book. Recent studies have indicated that online reading tends to break down in the face of "texts that require steady focus and linear attention". University teacher friends have told me that some of their freshers have started to write in a similar fashion to the way we apparently read online. All the right keywords are in the right paragraphs, but the sentences don't follow on coherently from each other. Their essays are meant to be skimmed, not read.
Of these two issues, that people are reading both less and less well, I am torn as to which is more serious. The latter may be easier to fix: simply noticing that I don't read as thoroughly online as I do in print has changed my habits and encouraged me to spend more time reading offline. Education systems could be designed to take this into account.
But it's harder to see how the decline in total reading time could be addressed. Certainly no one can force people to read for pleasure; people used to read more, and write more letters, because there were few other options. My family is fortunate to have preserved some of the hundreds of letters my grandmother exchanged with her brothers, Alan and Henry, while they were fighting in the second world war. They didn't write these letters to improve their skills in comprehension and composition; they did it because it was the only way to stay in touch. If they'd had mobile phones and been able to call each other every day, I'm sure they'd have done so. And if they'd had a TV set or an X-Box to relax with at the end of a hard day in basic training, they might have preferred that to a novel.
But perhaps technology can offer solutions as well. One bright spot in my reading life recently has been the Golden Notebook Project in which I and six other women writers read and discussed Doris Lessing's novel over several weeks. The social, collaborative nature of the project encouraged me to stick with a classic which, while it is in many ways astonishing, was occasionally so infuriating that I wanted to hurl it across the room. The future of e-Readers may offer more opportunities for this kind of social reading. Or perhaps the global economic apocalypse will encourage more of us to embrace a simpler philosophy and spend our evenings at home with a good book.
But while I hate to side with the neophobes I can't help feeling a little concerned; as the loss of the ancient Greek oral culture shows, ways of thinking and using our brains can disappear for good. Reading initiatives are generally targeted at children, but I think it's time to start encouraging adults to, as it says on the back of Penguin books, Read More. The Greeks may have replaced their oral traditions with Plato and Aristotle but, though I love computer games, I don't feel that trading the reading culture for Guitar Hero is a fair swap.