I like to read. And I like to read long stuff. I remember devouring Eliot Morison’s 14 volume History of U.S. Naval Operations in WW II in high school. I like New Yorker and Atlantic articles’ I also like information and facts and mysteries. I even subscribe to Longform, a site that delivers long articles of interest. I love the Internet with its access to original documents and instant access to things to read more of. Want to read the original Supreme Court opinion on something? No problem. Twenty seconds to get a copy off the SCOTUS website. Can’t find an article you are sure you read years ago? Maybe 30 seconds of searching and you’ll find a reference and location.
I also recognize the “book reading” as the greatest anti-social device ever invented. Waiting for a bus, a doctor, on an airplane, anywhere, and don’t want to talk to anyone, whip out your Kindle, magazine, or book and everyone will recognize and honor the invisible barrier you have erected around yourself.
My liberal friends (oops, almost typed the adjective “luddite) constantly decry the current generation’s inability to pay attention and to read long books, not to mention their overly social obsession with Tik-Tok and narcissistic blogs. So I was really interested to read an essay by Daniel Immerwahr in the latest New Yorker (January 27, 2025.)
Immerwahr – I love the name: translates from the German as “always true” – quotes the theologian Adam Kotsko, ““I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch “Students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from
readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” I remember reading not too long ago about a professor at Columbia where they have a “Great Books” required reading course being approached by a struggling student who remarked she was unable to get through a book having never been assigned one in high school.
Several technology writers have raised concerns about the Internet and its distractive quality. For example Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil from 1995 and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and other fearful prognostications by Johann Hari, Jenny Odell, and Nyir Eyal all warn of our lack of attention.
It seems every generation fears the deleterious effects of each new technology. I remember reading a piece concerned that the telephone would drive us apart by eliminating the neighborly front porch conversations when all we had to do was pick up the phone. And a book by a pilot (you become an expert by simply belonging to a profession) who was sure the advent of swept wing aircraft like the 707 would have planes falling from the skies. Immerwahr cites lots of historical examples of the fear.
Hawthorne in 1843 “warns of the arrival of a technology so powerful that those born after it will lose the capacity for mature conversation. They will seek separate corners rather than common spaces, he prophesies. Their discussions will devolve into acrid debates, and “all mortal intercourse” will be “chilled with a fatal frost.” Hawthorne’s worry? The replacement of the open fireplace by the iron stove.”
“ a long section in Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates argues that writing will wreck people’s memories.”
Remember the panic about comic books? My mother made my brother and me throw out a box of comics found in the attic of a house we had just moved into.
Although today’s critics rue our inability to get through long novels, such books were once widely regarded as the intellectual equivalent of junk food. “They fix attention so deeply, and afford so lively a pleasure, that the mind, once accustomed to them, cannot submit to the painful task of serious study,” the Anglican priest Vicesimus Knox complained. Thomas Jefferson warned that once readers fell under the spell of novels—“this mass of trash”—they would lose patience for “wholesome reading.” They’d suffer from “bloated imagination, sickly judgement, and disgust toward all the real business of life.”
“As far as the distractions caused by the Internet, Samuel Johnson in two essays, “The Rambler” (1750-52) and “The Idler” (1758-60), two essays exulted in such mental wandering. Johnson was constantly picking up books and just as constantly putting them down. When a friend asked whether Johnson had actually finished a book he claimed to have “looked into,” he replied, “No, Sir, do you read books through?”
But perhaps attentiveness is not healthy. “ Maybe the mind required a little leaping around to do its work.” “the loudest calls to attention have been directed toward subordinates, schoolchildren, and women. “Atten-TION!” military commanders shout at their men to get them to stand straight. The arts of attention are a form of self-discipline, but they’re also ways to discipline others.” Industrial life demands attention as does school work. Being part of a machine requires attentiveness to prevent accidents and poor quality of work. Not being fully attentive during a class lecture is considered rude and is demanded by professors who take it as an insult to their hard preparation, even if their work may be stultifying in delivery. Revolutionary consciousness meant asserting “the right to be lazy,” Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son
Insisted.” Attention was a mechanism of subjugation.
Of course, to hammer away at the insidiousness of the new technologies, they are labeled as “addictive.” Surely anything as addictive as the Internet can’t be good for you. I don’t know how much attention they have given to ice cream, my personal addiction. The “sound bites” everyone decries may be simply a way to capture the attention of the audience in order to sell them something. But short doesn’t necessarily mean devoid of content. There are many cogent short essays and videos, not to mention poems, that convey much in the way of emotion and content. Do you really need a 45 minute lecture on the value and meaning of the 1st amendment? For lawyers, perhaps, but would the average student not be better off with a short summary of the important points?
Immerwahr is skeptical of many of the “sky is falling claims.” The apparent decline of reading is also not so straightforward. Print book sales are holding steady, and audiobook sales are rising. The National Center for Education Statistics has tracked a recent drop in U.S. children’s reading abilities, yet that mostly coincides with the pandemic, and scores are still as good as or better than when the center started measuring, in 1971. If reading assignments at top colleges are shorter, it might be because today’s hypercompetitive students are busier, rather than because they’re less capable (and how many were actually doing all the reading in the old days?). What about Nicholas Carr’s insistence in 2010 that a Rhodes Scholar who didn’t read books heralded a post-literate future? “Of course I read books!” that Rhodes Scholar protested to another writer. Today, he holds a Ph.D. from Oxford and has written two books of his own.
But enough, back to reading while listening to some downloaded Bach organ.
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