Digital Delights - Digital Tribes

It is in our first nature to get second natures. Born with the habit of acquiring new habits we access a behavioral toolkit that is nowhere in our genes. A weakness of this otherwise wise strategy is that we often act without consciously thinking.

You, at this precise moment, are using an easy and a hard second nature. English is a particular configuration of your first-nature language system which, if acquired early, became a second nature easily and automatically. But reading is a skill requiring hard slow schooling. Language is innate but, as Steven Pinker says, text is “painstakingly bolted on.” Maryanne Wolf notes that reading has “no direct genetic program passing it on…” It can’t have: text has been widely available for only about 20 generations, and most of us have illiterate ancestors much more recently.