Why should we still read?
Sometimes I forget to read. It’s not that I forget how, I suddenly become illiterate or go temporarily blind — I just forget books are out there. Reading starts to play second fiddle to other activities. I’ll watch TV or a couple of movies, or I’ll play some video games for a while. Soon enough, I’ve spent my entire winter or summer break without having picked up a single book. In these long pauses I grow unaccustomed to reading and it becomes a struggle to pick it up again.
We are undoubtedly moving toward being a more visual culture. It’s estimated that about 50 percent of teenagers read at most one or two books a year. Reading often loses to things like chatting on the phone, blogging or watching TV. The vastness of digital entertainment is something like a rabbit hole; the Internet is bottomless. You can spend the rest of your life watching all the YouTube videos that were posted just this week. There’s so much variety and entertainment out there that the Internet becomes a massive time sink. Now that television shows are available at any time via streaming, people don’t need to coordinate their schedules to watch their weekly show. Our freedom to play a game or chat with a friend at any given time is in some ways very limiting. This is partially why attention disorder cases have risen along with technology availability. Our sudden freedom to choose when and how to entertain ourselves causes us to naturally drift toward visual media.
In some ways a book actually isn’t an exception to this rule. Like TV and the Internet, a book is media you put time and effort into. And we expect, at some level, to be entertained by this process. But there’s something different about books that can’t be matched by movies or videogames — no matter how much one tries to mimic the other — and that is the textual nature of the book: they have the capacity to convey information in totally raw data as words in conjunction with other words. This slow, step-by-step process is very healthy for us.
There are a number of positive benefits to reading, but the two most important are the development of thought and the expansion of memory. A book requires that you think. You cannot read a book and receive it passively like you would a movie or show. You have to exert effort in thinking about it. If you think about it, all media starts in written form as a script or design document. With television you’re subjecting yourself to someone else’s interpretation. But what makes reading different is that it requires you to do the work in constructing the scene. This is a great way for developing minds to build on their imagination, giving life to imageless scenes. The necessity to remember these scenes helps develop memory as well.
Should we still read as adults? Supposedly all this development has already taken place, so surely any sort of growth in imagination or memory is complete by the time we’ve entered college. Is there still something to gain by reading?
One of the most valuable things in book reading is that it provides a kind of sanctuary from our vapid culture. You can’t multitask while reading or read vacantly. In a culture that is all about snagging a few seconds of attention before turning away, a book is a very strange thing. It’s made to secure our attention for long periods of time with nothing getting in the way. A good book is like a boulder. While a little primitive, it makes for a great anchor in times of instability.