Though I belong to a generation that started using PCs in early youth, I still had time to develop reading skills with real books.

It is my comparative experience with younger people that those who got in touch with books earlier than with PCs have a different –and better– software inside their brains. Their memory is better, their ability of forming continuous images in their minds too, they can locate information quicker (and better, more meaningful information) than those who didn’t really learned how to read a book.

In some way, the printed word seems to carry with it some kind of software and to place it inside the brain during the very act of reading (for instance a novel) in a way that reading a laptop’s screen doesn’t.

There are scholars who say that the unique excellence of the Homeric poems comes from the fact that they were created or developed in an intermediary age, when the old oral memory skills weren’t lost yet, while the new writing resources were already available.

I’d really like to know whether there are serious studies comparing the old literacy (of those above 40/45) to the new one, that is, the literacy of those who could handle a laptop’s keyboard before they even learned how to read or write.

I don’t usually agree with the German Marxist philosopher Adorno, but I think he had a point when he said that 19th century music listeners were better than the modern ones. The old ones could read music and play an instrument: that was their most basic way of listening music. When the phongraph arrived, most listeners became musically iliterate, becoming at the same time unable to appreciate much of the complexity of the Western musical tradition.

So, will a guy who grew up in symbiosis with his laptop be able to read, say, War and Peace? And, if not, will this be an important loss?