In my earlier post on attentiveness, I lamented the decline in book reading that has become a regular feature of contemporary life.
Most people realize that reading is in decline, as distractions like
the i-phone, Facebook and text messaging assert their hegemony over our
mental spaces. Professor Katherine Hayles, who teaches English at Duke
University, expressed the concerns of many when she confessed, “I can’t
get my students to read whole books anymore.” When English graduates
don’t even like to read anymore, you know things are getting serious.
What has bypassed most people, however, is that the main reading
problem we face as a society is not simply that people aren’t reading
enough; rather, the real problem is how we read. Increasingly,
we find that when people pick up a book, they often come to it with the
same set of expectations they bring to the internet. Activities like
Facebook and Twitter exert their dominion over our minds precisely
because they condition us with a certain set of expectations that become
ubiquitous and which remain with us even when our computer or i-phone
is turned off.
More specifically, our constant saturation in digital distractions is
training us to be satisfied with triviality, to be content with
dialogue that is shallow, brief and disconnected. In short, we begin to
expect books to give us the same buzz that an i-phone provides, and when
it doesn’t, we quickly get bored.
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