J. Pharoah Doss: Books can’t compete with the screen?

Getty Images Stock Photo Novelist Philip Roth told an interviewer: The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete—beginning—with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen. Roth also stated that reading a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, attentiveness, and devotion to reading. It’s hard to find a significant number of people who possess those qualities.& Obviously, Roth was contrasting reading for entertainment with watching movies, sitcoms, or YouTube videos. Roth didn’t speculate on how the screen affected learning to read. People expected the digital age to improve children’s access to reading materials, boost America’s literacy rate, and generate more lifelong readers. Then we learned there was a “digital divide.” The term “digital divide” gained traction in the late 1990s. It described the gap between people with access to technology, the internet, and digital literacy training and those without. According to experts, those on the “have not” side of the digital divide will have lower school performance and fewer career possibilities, which will, in the long run, compound existing racial and class inequalities.& To ensure that rural and urban students did not fall behind their suburban...