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Sometime in the spring of 2011, which was long enough ago that I was still a devoted BlackBerry user, I decided that I was finished with paper. I dropped off most of my books at the library. I gave away a year’s worth of old issues of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. I bought a mobile scanner to digitize bills, receipts, and notes, part of my never-ending search for the optimal way to minimize paper.
From that point forward, I did pretty much all of my reading on electronic devices. Books and magazines went to the Kindle. News and longform articles came through the phone or the laptop. Sometimes I would glance at a print newspaper or read a physical book, almost always finding it immersive and refreshing. But immersion and refreshment came second to portability, efficiency, and an obsession with the idea that I might be able to “read it all” if only I could figure out how to “organize it all” and “take it all with me.”
Until now. A decade of relentless digital consumption has left me craving tactile, tangible content. This reversion to print began in early 2020 when Erin gave me a hardcover copy of Casey Cep’s Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. The transition picked up speed when she convinced me that our London apartment needed a bookshelf. Today, I find myself wanting nothing more than to escape from digital overwhelm and return to the world of analog.
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“Analog” can mean a lot of different things, but as a way of describing the transmission of written information, I take it to mean “non-digital.” Static. Linear. It has no hyperlinks, banner ads, pop ups, videos, or sounds. It has not been algorithmically generated. It does not update throughout the day, or ever. It cannot be clicked on or shared via social media.
The content that comes through an analog reading device is real. It is finite. The story it tells might not come to an end, but the technology that delivers the story—the newspaper, the magazine, the book—eventually does. In a world of instant and infinite information, the fact that analog content ends seems to be the attribute I crave the most.
In Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Maryanne Wolf paints a vivid picture of “the reader of the twenty-first century.” This is a person “whose eye increasingly will not stay still; whose mind darts like a nectar-driven hummingbird from one stimulus to another; whose ‘quality of attention’ is slipping imperceptibly with consequences none could have predicted.”1
Wolf cites a study suggesting that we read some 50,000 to 100,000 words every day, which, she notes, is “the same number of words as is found in many a novel.”2 Yet despite inhaling a book’s worth of digital information every day, many of us increasingly find what Wolf calls “deep reading” or “sustained reading” almost impossible. That owes at least in part to how we read online. Researchers have found that many people consume digital text in “an F or zigzag style in which we rapidly ‘word-spot’ through a text,” Wolf writes. We “grasp the context, dart to the conclusions at the end, and, only if warranted, return to the body of the text to cherry-pick supporting details.”3
But these habits aren’t confined to our digital lives. If we skim, zigzag, and hop around enough online, we literally rewire our brains until this behavior becomes our default way of operating online and offline, on BuzzFeed and in the pages of a beach read.4 As Wolf puts it, “the more we read digitally, the more our underlying brain circuitry reflects the characteristics of that medium.”5
The brain is constantly changing based on what we do with it, and what we do with it is spend our days bouncing from one digital information flow to another, from the inbox to social media to the phone’s notification screen to the browser bursting with tabs. As Nicholas Carr explains in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, if we do this enough—and research suggests it doesn’t take long to reach “enough”—the brain starts operating this way all the time.6
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Have you ever opened your phone or tablet intending to read a very specific e-book, only to end up reading whatever was left on the screen the last time you last closed the device? What would you do if the circumstances were analog, not digital—if you picked up a paperback romance novel, say, and discovered a microeconomics textbook inside? Presumably, you wouldn’t just shrug and read the textbook instead (although you might consider the reverse scenario). Yet our digital devices determine our behavior like this all the time.
This is a micro-example of “technological determinism,” a concept that helps explain why so many of us have begun to read, write, and think like the internet. Technological determinism suggests that technology itself, not only what we do with it or what content flows across it, actually changes how we think, how we see the world, and how we understand reality. Contrary to what we often assume (and what tech companies like to claim7), technology is not simply a neutral platform for transmitting information. Yes, the information affects us, but so does the technology through which we access it.8
For instance, after spending a lot of time online, Carr began to notice that “my brain… wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it—and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became.”9 In my case, the more digital content I consume, the more overwhelmed I get, the more compelled I feel to try to somehow get on top of it by consuming even more—and the less I seem to derive any insight, knowledge, or understanding from what I’m consuming.
Reading an article online has become an exercise of scanning and skimming while constantly opening links in the background to scan and skim later. When it comes to e-books, meanwhile, the reading experience somehow manages to be both distracting—not only are there hyperlinks, but there are millions of other books lurking a few taps away—and homogenous. Every e-book looks and feels identical to every other e-book. With little difference in texture, color, font, layout, shape, or size to distinguish one from another, recalling what you’ve read and learned becomes that much more difficult.
That means e-books often feel like just another tap into the internet’s never-ending stream of information, all of it waiting to be processed as quickly as possible.10 And when you do make it to the end of an e-book? You’ll be lucky to have even a moment to reflect on what you just read or celebrate the accomplishment of finishing before the device reminds you of all the reading you haven’t done and all the information you haven’t consumed. People who bought “Reframe the Day” also bought…
***
After years of thinking that I could solve my perpetual sense of digital overwhelm if only I could organize content better so I could consume more of it, I’ve come to accept that the content is not the problem. Finding the right app or device is not the problem. Time management is not the problem. The problem is further upstream: It’s the technology itself. It’s the dynamic, hyperlinked, always-connected, never-ending medium of digital text.
That means the problem will not be solved by honing a better digital organizing system or silencing more notifications or saving articles as PDFs to read later or disabling the Kindle’s “interactive” features or changing my devices to grayscale so hyperlinks look a little less seductive. The only way to solve the problem is to change the technology.
Print books don’t have links. They don’t display notifications. They don’t let you open any tabs. They don’t run ads. They don’t need to be charged. They don’t let you access your inbox or your social media feeds. They don’t update you on what other people are doing. They don’t distract you with context-free and conflict-driven breaking news alerts.
And they don’t go on forever. When they end, they sit on a shelf, or go to a friend, or get returned to a library, or rest on a table. They are flipped through and referenced and admired. “You see them, and you feel them,” as my friend Aun Abdi put it in our recent conversation. “There’s knowledge inside them, and you can feel that.”11 That knowledge, which has been polished and time-tested, which is concrete and finite, is a stark contrast to the chaotic information tsunami that greets us every time we open our digital devices.
It took me a decade to get here, but I’m finally beginning to see what other human beings have seen for more than 500 years: The physical book is an amazing technology. It does one thing. It does it well. And then it ends.
Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (Harper Collins: 2018) (70).
Wolf, 72-73.
Wolf, 77.
This concept is known as “neuroplasticity.” See Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Norton: 2010).
Wolf, 80.
“As particular circuits in our brain strengthen through the repetition of a physical or mental activity, they begin to transform that activity into a habit. The chemically triggered synapses that link our neurons program us, in effect, to want to keep exercising the circuits they’ve formed” (Carr, 34).
https://www.wired.com/story/how-tech-firms-like-uber-hide-behind-the-platform-defense; https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/facebook-and-youtubes-platform-excuse-dying/591466
As the critic and theorist Neil Postman put it in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin: 1985), “To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple” (157).
Carr, 16.
Postman described the book as “an excellent container for the accumulation, quiet scrutiny[,] and organized analysis of information and ideas” (69).
Read an excerpt from our conversation here. Check out the full discussion on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts, or search for “Book Talk Today” wherever you get your podcasts.