Reading in the age of social media

Image attribution: Charles James Lewis, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Charles-james-lewis-reading-by-the-window.jpg

"Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path." ~Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World (1996)

 

Walk into a waiting room or a train compartment and you see people glued to their phones, almost everyone is hypnotized by their screen. Every now and then you get a refreshing break, there is something disarming in a stranger reading a book in public. Intentionally or unintentionally they are encouraging others to be readers too.

Social media platforms and their addiction-inducing algorithms are playing with human brains in an ongoing world-wide uncontrolled experiment. They are habituating hordes of humans to (very) short-form content, flitting again and again from one sensational post to another, from one trending topic to another, goading us to outrage as we doom-scroll. Tweets, photos, gifs, and video clips have become currencies for exchanging ideas and experiences. In this milieu, what is the place of long-form reading—essays, articles, and books—mediums that allow you to stick to a given train of thought, building one idea upon another, one event after another?

The long-form is where you have a better chance to reach the truth of things, because it lets you dwell on an idea, play with it, look at it from multiple perspectives, appreciate nuances, see the full story, and construct a deeper and coherent understanding of something. A physical book affords natural safeguards from digression by not letting you click on links and opening a hundred tabs. Video streaming platforms keep the long-form alive in their own way albeit without giving you the freedom to construct your own mental images. I will keep this essay limited to long-form reading. I don't know for sure if long-form reading is declining worldwide, but it does seem to be the case in the USA (see charts from Statista and Washington Post) and possibly in other countries. Reading is definitely something that we need more of.

In Part 11 'The Persistence of Memory' of the Cosmos TV series, Carl Sagan conjures the following timeless words in praise of books, "What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

Humans have a propensity to tribalism and to categorize people as 'us' and 'them'. The antidote to such xenophobia is made up of enchanting stories from faraway lands, often mediated through (translated) books, to be able to see our shared humanity across borders. Good listening is mostly about listening with an intention to understand, and without an intention to respond. Reading is perhaps the best way of listening without an intention to respond.

With respect to reading it is easy to think, "What's the point. I will forget all of what I read, within a matter of few weeks." American writer David Perell lays out the paradox of reading, "The books you read will profoundly change you even though you’ll forget the vast majority of what you read." Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham elaborates this same claim in the language of computer programming, "Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source [code] of. It works, but you don't know why."

Besides such implicit gains, to keep more concrete proofs of your toil, you can leverage your reading by taking notes as you read or shortly after you read. Then of course it is up to you how you guard this treasure trove of your prized collections, and make it easily accessible to your future self. I use TiddlyWiki and Google Keep for note taking. But irrespective of the tool you use, the collection comes in handy whenever you sit down to write anything. There is this symbiotic relation between reading and writing. Reading more helps your writing. Writing more helps your reading. But don't limit your take-aways to seldom opened files. If you are a reader, your designated job is to excavate the hidden pearls and release them in the real world, in your conversations with your family, friends, and colleagues.

Let me leave aside this utilitarian view of reading, and come to the very joy of reading. You could read not for any future benefit but for the pleasure you experience in the present. One of the singular joys of reading a book lies in those pauses when you let your own ideas and experiences resonate with the lines you just read. Reading makes pauses easy and involuntary, giving you moments to savour a particular thought. You can feel your horizons expanding in real time. Reading provides solace in the darkest of times. As American author James Baldwin says, "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read." English writer W. Somerset Maugham concurs, "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."

So here is a call for action. Read more, in private and in public. Promote and encourage long-form reading. Recommend, lend, and gift books to others. Talk about books you've read, how they made you feel, and what you learned from them. Visit, support, and use libraries, be it your city library, university library, community library, or an online library. Build libraries, be it your office library, lab library, workshop library, or home library.

In December 2019, blissfully unaware of the impending pandemic, I was strolling through an exhibition titled 'Photography of Chim' at the Museum of The Jewish People, Tel Aviv, Israel. I stood alone and perplexed in front of a poignant photograph (1948) by Polish photojournalist David 'Chim' Seymour titled "Blind boy who lost his arms during the war has learned to read [a Braille book] with his lips, Rome". Let this boy remind you of your privilege to be able to read.