Digital addictions mean we can't read books anymore. And that's a problem.
| Cleveland
Chances are that in the next few seconds something will lure you away from this essay: an incoming text, an email, a sexier headline on this page, even a link within this piece. For those of you who will succumb to one of these distractions, I bid you farewell and hope that we鈥檒l meet again on Twitter, whose format was perfectly designed for our new culture of interruption.
For those of you who just checked email or your Instagram feed and have returned to this piece, welcome back. I鈥檓 not offended. This is the new world order.
Office workers are interrupted 鈥� or self-interrupt 鈥� roughly every three minutes, according to recent studies. And it can take some 23 minutes for a worker to return to the original task. That鈥檚 that references the work of Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies digital distraction. Now I鈥檓 no math whiz, but doesn鈥檛 that mean that the typical office worker never really gets back on task?
A recent observed teens in their normal homework/study environments 鈥� bedroom, library, kitchen table. They were told to work on an important school assignment for 15 minutes. Although they knew they were being observed, the vast majority of students didn鈥檛 make it past two minutes without texting or checking social media.
But this is not a generational thing. More than 60 percent of adults have smart phones, which means most of us have willingly turned ourselves into Pavlov鈥檚 dogs, edgy and distracted, awaiting the next stimuli. I see people of all ages around me abandoning the moment they鈥檙e in to search for something better. We do it at meetings, during conversations with our spouses or children, at restaurants and baseball games. I鈥檓 not pointing fingers; I do it, too. It鈥檚 almost impossible not to.
My friend Kevin, a writer and filmmaker in his 40s, recently did something about all the digital distraction in his life: He turned in his iPhone 5 and got a flip phone. Within days, he was a new man. He reports being more focused, more creative, calmer, happier. He says he鈥檚 able to read books again, to get lost in a novel or a long carefully-crafted argument.
Kevin may be one of the few people out there to go back to a flip phone, but he鈥檚 not the first person to wonder if he鈥檇 lost the ability to read books. Nicholas Carr started writing 鈥淭he Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brain,鈥� after realizing that he couldn鈥檛 focus long enough to get engaged in a book anymore. Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist at Tufts University and one of the world鈥檚 leading experts on the study of reading, had to re-train herself to read long-form fiction. In not being able to get past the first page of a Herman Hesse novel. She spent two weeks taking a break from the Internet to help her regain the cognitive focus necessary to read.
If these intellectual giants are having trouble reading, how do you think your teenager is doing? Not very well, , which found that the number of teens that never (or hardly ever) read for pleasure has tripled in the past three decades. About half of 17 year olds admit that they only read for pleasure once or twice a year.
To read a novel, once upon a time, all you had to do was suspend your disbelief. Now you have to suspend your belief that the world will end if you lose digital access for a few hours. To enter the story, to really escape, you have to unplug. And that鈥檚 just not an option for so many people today.
And that鈥檚 a shame. Because reading is still the best way to lose yourself, in my opinion. Some might argue for meditation or yoga, but reading is the one activity that gets me completely outside of my self. Great fiction increases our empathic powers and loosens ego鈥檚 grip. When I enter the mind of a carefully drawn character, I stop picking at all the scabs of my emotional life, at least for a while. I forget about upcoming presentations, I stop keeping score, and I relax.
Every year my family spends a week at the beach in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I spend the week on the couch 鈥� it鈥檚 too distracting to read at the beach 鈥� with two fat novels. I come home refreshed, not by sun and sand, but by fiction. I am lighter because, for a week, I am freed from the burden of lugging myself around.
To read is at once to live in the moment and to escape time. It鈥檚 as close to spirituality as some of us can get. And it won鈥檛 happen if we can鈥檛 let go of disbelief 鈥� and our smart phones 鈥� for at least a few hours at a time.
Jim Sollisch is creative director at聽Marcus Thomas听础诲惫别谤迟颈蝉颈苍驳.听
