Does Computer Use Destroy Reading Ability?

NOTE! If you enjoy this post, please feel free to twitter it with the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/c49r59. Thanks, I appreciate it!

I realized yesterday that I have lost the ability to read, and I really miss it but can’t figure out just where along the way I lost it.

Don’t misunderstand me. I can still understand the meaning of printed words and sentences. Guess what I should have said is that I have lost the mindset necessary to read a book or even a longish magazine article.

I was raised without television. My father loathed TV and wouldn’t allow a set in the house. Then I spent the years in the Queen Charlotte Islands and there simply was no TV. Hell, there wasn’t even electricity in the sense of power from the grid.

The main source of entertainment and education all those years was books. Almost everyone on the islands was an avid reader and I was known for chewing through books faster than most and being able to retain and synthesize the material I read. That characteristic provided a great deal of my identity and self-image.

Now I find it difficult to read a simple novel. Reading requires being able to make a sort of ‘mind-meld’ with the author. You have to be able to enter his world and accept his premises, at least for a while. I guess its my ability to concentrate that’s shot. I can’t think of a better way to describe it anyway.

I’m not sure what caused this. Computers certainly had something to do with it. My use of the net is, I think fairly typical. I bounce from page to page, spend some time on this task, some on that. Multi-tasking.

In this information age there is simply so much data available that the biggest problem isn’t finding information, its determining relevance and trustworthiness. Someone famously said: Looking for information on the internet is like trying to get a drink of water from a fire hydrant. That certainly has something to do with it. The other factor is simply the modern lifestyle that I’ve plugged into, although that lifestyle has its roots in computing, so it is sort of a different side of the same thing.

There are simply so many things to keep up with and care about nowadays. Everybody I know has lots of different irons in the fire and they spend most of their time trying to determine the most important thing to invest their energy in for the next five minutes.

One thing that reading requires is the ability to set aside substantial blocks of time to hang out with an author. True reading isn’t just being exposed to the information. No, its chewing the information slowly, absorbing it and eventually understand what the writer meant down below the words the used to form the sentences. For a while, you have to be able to abandon your way of thinking and try on someone else’s, see what is useful to you, keep that and junk the rest. Its a very active process, not a passive one.

That’s what I’ve lost. That’s what I miss. I hope the reading muscles have only lost tone and not atrophied altogether. Wish me luck.

Has anybody else noticed this and been bothered by it? What did you do to counter-act this?

Posted by: swampy | 03-01-2009 | 06:03 PM
Posted in: Uncategorized