what do you think you’re doing?
Believe it or not you are currently doing something which, largely, led to development of today’s modern civilisation, reading. But for how long exactly will we continue to do so is a question now vexing our greatest thinkers.
The fear that reading is on the wane is hardly new. In 1985, Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ detailed how television was stealing our attention and limiting our powers of concentration. Yet today we have entered a whole new world. The ol’ goggle-box may have been a little distracting but we could always get off our backsides and move to another room, or go out to play, or enjoy an early night. Or, God forbid, read a book. There is, however, no escaping the smartphone, a device which demands your entire life.
Reading is in sharp decline: the National Literacy Trust has recently reported that more than a third of UK adults profess to have given up on it “altogether”, along with correspondingly “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s’ reading levels. Placed together, the body argues that we are in danger of becoming a post-literate society and warns this would have dire long-term consequences for humanity. Both scientific reasoning and democratic societal law will be undermined and our “helpless, credulous” electorate will increasingly fall prey to fake news, political shysters and populists. Well I never.
The written word freed us from the shackles of our poor and fallible memory. Once it was possible to fix and arrange words outside of our mind, they could be inspected, analysed, compared and contradicted – creating a new capacity for civilised debate. As we shrink from this we run the risk entering a dark age where we will neither recognise the truth nor be able to discern or debate it. It should be remembered that the banning and/or burning of books is often one of the first acts of repressive societies. NB An initiative by the Government of Singapore will now see citizens paid to read books as part of a scheme designed to address concerns over social media use. The sums are admittedly tiny – an individual would have to log fifty consecutive daily reading sessions to bag the equivalent of 60p – but I certainly approve of their attempt to nudge adults to put down their screens (with the obvious exception being a kindle!) and develop lasting reading habits. Let’s hope they’re not fighting a losing battle.
