“Turning, one evening, from my phone to a book, I set myself the task of reading a single chapter in one sitting. Simple. But I couldn’t. […] Paragraphs swirled; sentences snapped like twigs, and sentiments bled out. The usual, these days. I drag my vision across the page and process little. Half an hour later, I throw down the book and watch some Netflix.”
These are the opening words to Michael Harris’ opinion article, “I Have Forgotten How to Read,” featured in The Globe and Mail this past February.
Sent to me by a friend who thought it would be of interest, this article spoke to me with chilling clarity and familiarity. In his piece, Harris writes about how we as a society have forgotten how to read — not literally, but in the sense that our constant reliance on social media and truncated stories has limited our ability to process and truly enjoy reading books.
As an English major and self-proclaimed avid reader and writer, I found myself deeply unsettled by how many moments of book infidelity I could relate to mentioned throughout the article. Harris writes that we have become primed to hone in on “the useful fact” and “the shareable link,” thanks to social media, something I have gotten all too used to over the past few years. I spend too much time tapping at my phone, “liking” things on Facebook, and taking BuzzFeed quizzes … when I used to instead spend hours on end comfortably curled up on the sofa with my nose stuck in a book, contentedly lost in a world that was not my own.
To me, it’s sad and disheartening that this is what it’s come to. I miss the old me that would find rest and contentment in devouring a novel for several hours straight, in contrast to when I now crave the “mental Tabasco sauce” that is found in the short status updates, online articles, and blog posts of the Internet. Now, reading just a chapter of a novel can sometimes be exhausting; I don’t have the same endurance and desire to read uninterrupted. My mind is distracted and fragmented. While I don’t know how many other book lovers out there are experiencing this same shift, I still somehow know I’m not alone in this.
So the real question is, what can be done? Social media is so pervasive that it’s infiltrated who we are as a society and as individuals; most of us carry phones in our bags rather than dog-eared paperbacks (for those of you who still do, I applaud you). Getting rid of social media is out of the question. But perhaps we can change our mindsets. We can alter the way we approach books; we can remember how it feels to become completely immersed in a story.
Doing so might not feel natural, but in fact, Harris says, “The deep reading that a novel demands doesn’t come easy and it was never ‘natural.’” We have to fight against our instincts of distractedness. We have to go back to a time before social media took over, when, for some of us, books meant everything.
It is a journey, one that is well worth taking.