Channelling Michael Flanders…

While away, I read an interesting article in Saturday's Times about how the Internet is destroying our reading habits, by a chappie called Nicholas Carr. With the Times being behind a paywall, I would point you, if you want to get much the same argument, to a similar article by the same author at the Atlantic's website (src).

His thesis is that we are no longer able to read extended sections of prose or analyse detailed arguments. His preferred form of presentation of this thesis was in an extended section of prose, with detailed argument. So this report may be misleading: I naturally skim-read the first paragraph and then lost interest. According to the Times article, he has also written a book about this. Mind you, I haven't read it. I'm waiting for someone to make a Youtube cartoon out of it [1].

But although there is a bit of a contradiction in declaring modern society incapable of reading extended sections of prose in a two-page newspaper article, I want to take him a little more seriously than that. Nevertheless, I do doubt his thesis. I don't find it significantly more difficult to read paper texts with intent now than I did a few years ago. My job, for the last three or four years, has demanded it and I maintain the ability.

I do, however, agree that reading an article on a computer screen is a different experience from reading the same article on paper. I take more time over the paper than over the screen, a function partly of the inherent undesirability of looking at a constantly-updating screen for prolonged periods. Equally, though, I have been reading ebooks on my monitor and while I only read relatively short sections (for the reason given above), I don't find any great struggle to read them properly, or at least as properly as ever I have done: I skim-read even as a child. Perhaps that accounts for it, but perhaps it doesn't. I tend to find it easier to proceed on the assumption that I'm not altogether abnormal, despite what my loving family will tell me at every available opportunity.

The fact that my bookshelves are stacked and keep growing (whenever I can afford it…) would seem to suggest that being a heavy Internet user does not impair my ability to read books. Or even newspapers, which must be good news for those who want to use newspapers to propagate a warning that we are losing the ability to read newspaper articles.

[1] Apologies to Michael Flanders for brazenly updating his joke for the twenty-first century.