Do you remember how you used to read as a child? Do you remember that total immersion in another world, the real one falling away to be replaced by snowy Narnia wastes, a secret garden, a trio of interwar children pulling on ballet shoes for Madame Fidolia, or your gang of Outlaws hatching plans in the barn then roaming the stockbroker belt and causing chaos for its hapless adult inhabitants, according to taste?
Even if you weren’t particularly bookwormish, even if you didn’t grow up to be “a reader”, you almost certainly experienced such joy – more than once if you sucked the marrow of a single favourite book’s bones.
Do you think you would have done the same if that book, those books, had come equipped with an almost infinite variety of games, music, shops, funny videos, access to all your friends, interruptions from those friends at any moment containing links to further games, music, shops, videos and every other distraction on offer worldwide?
No. No, of course you wouldn’t. Even I wouldn’t, and I was the bookiest of bookworms, someone who would go on to develop this single hobby at the expense of all othersand most of my social development, rendering myself largely unfit for human society by the age of 30.
So is it any wonder that the latest annual survey of nearly 115,000 children by the National Literacy Trust has found that children’s enjoyment of reading has fallen to its lowest level since the study began 20 years ago?
What always astonishes me, whenever news like this comes out, is the number of apologists and deniers who emerge – like fauns! or the bright-eyed robin who came to watch Mary work, perhaps! or Posy when she jetés like a mad thing across the dance academy stage! – to claim that those who are concerned are Luddites, worrying about nothing.
“Things change all the time,” they argue. The advent of the internet, of AI, of ChatGPT into our lives, the replacement of paper pages by screens from infancy onward, is fine. It’s akin to printing making scribes redundant, or the invention of writing making memorisation unnecessary. Now that we get virtually everything we need aurally and visually via our ever-present flickering screens, literacy too is becoming passé.
Oh brave new world that has such morons in it.
Don’t. Just don’t. Leaving aside the tiny point that the world would be AMAZING if we had all retained such skills as the ability to memorise and recall yards of prose, poetry, facts and fiction at will instead of jettisoning them the moment something new came along, don’t look at me and try to tell me with a straight face that any kind of movement towards a post-literate society is good news.
Make no mistake: this is exactly where technology is leading us. People (me very much among them) romanticise the novel in the abstract as the greatest way of learning how to live, of exposing yourself to a thousand times more individuals, thoughts, consciousnesses than you could ever otherwise hope to manage during your own nugatory lifetime. And as the nonpareil method of teaching you how language works, of giving you command over it, of allowing you to absorb it and turn it to your own expressive advantage, smoothing, burnishing and deepening the pleasures of life as you go.
But this skips over a more fundamental aspect of the novel: its existence (for most of that existence, solely) as an object, as a physical thing. Because when you look for harms caused by tech, you don’t even have to go so far as social media or the plethora of tempting entertainments – all designed to be as dopamine-stoking and addictive as possible – for sources of damage to our fragile little human psyches. The simple existence of screens is where it begins.
There are plenty of studies that show that when we read from books we engage more deeply and retain more information for longer than we do when we read on screens, because the latter are so affectless.
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When we read from books, similar parts of our brains light up as do when we read maps – we treat them as a matter of topographical interest, using the thickness of the wodge in one hand compared with the other to keep track of where we are in the story, and are often able to jog our own memories about a plot point by visualising where, roughly, we saw it on the page. It’s part of how we learn. The physicality is part of how we grow, how we supplement our knowledge and ourselves. The book is a near perfect piece of technology for human beings, allowing us to extract maximum value from it.
It’s a distinction most of us instinctively recognise on some level. We keep our Kindles for thrillers or lighter fiction and buy hard copies of the things we know contain treasures that need to be extracted with more effort and attention. On top of that, older adults know from our experience of moving from the paper to digital age how different it feels; how much our own attention spans have been eroded by the endless distractions on offer.
Imagine being a digital native who has no idea what your mind is truly capable of. Who thinks this fragmented, disjointed state of being is normal and does not know what joys it leaves for ever out of reach?
If you want to imagine the future, imagine a pixelated boot stamping on an oblivious face forever. We owe our children more than this.
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