It is because it’s not about what one is reading or the quantity of reading being done but how one is reading. For some people, having the bulk of one’s daily reading being all those disconnected short-form chunks (e-mails, Tweets, social media posts, Slack updates, news alerts, short articles, BBS comments, etc.) makes it more difficult to do the concentrated and focused reading needed for novels and non-fiction books and long-form articles.
The way we consume our media and the form it takes definitely impacts our processing abilities. For example, the new golden age of television demands more in terms of concentration than did all those old sitcoms and procedural dramas where everything was resolved by the episodes’s end and the next episode started fresh (except perhaps for a catchphrase) as if everything from the previous episode never happened. Now – not only on prestige cable dramas but also on some network sitcoms – we have to be aware of long and short story and character arcs, payoffs and callbacks that may come episodes or even seasons later. In a way it’s the opposite of what’s been happening with reading, and given the comparisons of some series to classic novels it may not be a co-incidental development.
Personally, I find myself pushing myself to read full books in a way I didn’t have to before the Web became so pervasive. It’s not a hard push for me, and I’m fortunate to have the free time to lose myself in a book once I start one.
However, I’ve increasingly run into people I once knew to be voracious readers who find it more difficult to do that. They always point to this phenomenon as one of the reasons (lack of time for a good stretch of concentrated reading being another, related one).
To me the concentrating (or being unable to) is mostly impacted by what i’m reading. Typically if i’m reading a novel and it’s something i enjoy i’m all in, but if it’s a dry read or something that demands more concentration then i’m not going to be able to stick with it unless i take regular breaks.
Also we do have to consider that this type of decrying of the death of long form books isn’t new, when printed books, paperbacks, newspapers came out some people were saying that it was negatively impacting people’s ability to process literary works. I don’t really buy that… maybe people these days are less willing to put the effort into reading difficult and dense literary works but then again i’m biased against those because i never had the patience to read that kind of material.
Gee, here I sit, 73 years old, on-line since the days of acoustic couplers, with a lit Ph.D. and decades of writing experience (academic and journalistic and personal), still reading novels (I get restless unless there’s one in progress) and long-form non-fiction (usually history–working my way through The Guns of August currently), still enjoying movies and plays and the surprising (for one who remembers “My Mother the Car”) amount of good TV. . . . However did I manage to maintain all those modes of absorption, given the amount of time I have come to spend looking at a computer or tablet screen? Is my neuro unusually plastic?
I note that many of my wife’s students (university, all levels) seem to be bad readers, period–even the syllabus gives them trouble. I suspect faulty early training coupled with lack of practice of the kind that requires precision (say, in the form of “Get this right if you want a passing grade”).
The difference now is that there’s a constant bombardment of demands pushed on us throughout the day (many of them mandated by an employer, many self-imposed) to read this e-mail, that news story, this project status update, that comment on BBS. The mind is trained to get through each as quickly as possible, preferably resolving it and closing it out.
This reading process is at odds with how we normally read books. It takes a certain cognitive discipline to switch gears, one that isn’t intuitive for most people and one that, if it is intuitive, now requires an act of will to engage.
Meh. I read fiction every day, at least during lunch. I get enough non-fiction reading in at work. Maybe if I was only an Insta-Face-Whatever child living off an RSS feed I’d be worried.
I think it helps if we think of a lot of what we read online as “magazine” writing. Sure there’s a lot of tabloid grade nonsense, and click bait involved. But if you look at the media environment you get the sense that a lot more people are reading “respectible” stuff. There’s been a revolution in media criticism. The sort of analytical writing on tv and and books that used to be the purview of trade publications, obscure journals, low circulation fan magazines and academic environments is everywhere now. I used to have to read celebrity gossip publications when I was in film school to pick up stuff that’s easy to come across these days. And the same is roughly true of things like politics, science, and a dozen other subjects. So people are reading that. More people than used to. Or all that content wouldn’t really exist. And a fair bit of it is diloberately targeted at yoing folks.
So amid all the snap chat and bullshit people are obviously reading more quality stuff.
It always strikes me that these are the same people who complain when people do read books. But those books are genre paper backs, or 50 shades of grey. And still shit talk TV despite all the straight fucking art on TV these days. A lot of the things they advocate would involve straight up withdrawl from the broader mass culture. Which for your purposes aint good for kids. Those kids are more likely to be isolated, and IIRC get their asses beat on the regular. But its just the pearl clutching end of the high culture/low culture debate. When you get right down to it its all just culture. And where you’re pointing to people who read 100k words a day online and nothing else. Those are people who wouldn’t have been reading anything 25 years ago.
I was looking at it more like each word being 340KB, like hi-res flowery word art. One novel’s worth per day.
To be more on topic, if I may offer an analogy, listening to top 40 music all day at work shouldn’t diminish one’s capacity to enjoy a symphony when they get home. But I’m afraid classical music may be a dying art, especially given the ongoing regress of education systems. Same applies to novel-reading.
I’m not going to pretend that this is a scientific examination of the 34-gig claim, but I just looked at the directory where I store a chunk of my e-book collection: 99 items in a mixture of formats (mobi, pdf, azw3, epub, doc), 155 meg. Even with all manner of enhancements and formatting and metadata, text doesn’t take up a lot of storage space.
Yeah, this is not a problem for me. I still read long books and articles. With two young kids and a seemingly endless list of things to get done around the house and the feeling that, while at work, I really shouldn’t be starting that medium.com post, it’s more about not having time.
What many seem to be missing is that humans are creatures of habit; and if one gets into the habit of reading chunks of info as rapidly as possible, instead of reading leisurely and gradually absorbing content for the sheer pleasure of it, that can change the way one’s mind processes material.
Obviously, this isn’t going to hold true for everyone, but I can personally attest to the fact that the way I read has changed because of the internet… and not necessarily for the better.
Ditto. And while, in the balance, I’m glad to have the River Platte internet, my personal shift from being able to enter a mild fugue state to having mild ADD is a cost I’m working to rectify.
