{"id":133470,"date":"2019-02-08T11:25:19","date_gmt":"2019-02-08T16:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=133470"},"modified":"2019-12-10T18:02:24","modified_gmt":"2019-12-10T23:02:24","slug":"reading-in-the-age-of-constant-distraction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/02\/08\/reading-in-the-age-of-constant-distraction\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Johan Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Laesende lille pige, 1900<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI read books to read myself,\u201d Sven Birkerts wrote in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age<\/em>. Birkerts\u2019s book, which turns twenty-five this year, is composed of fifteen essays on reading, the self, the convergence of the two, and the ways both are threatened by the encroachment of modern technology. As the culture around him underwent the sea change of the internet\u2019s arrival, Birkerts feared that qualities long safeguarded and elevated by print were in danger of erosion: among them privacy, the valuation of individual consciousness, and an awareness of history\u2014not merely the facts of it, but a sense of its continuity, of our place among the centuries and cosmos. \u201cLiterature holds meaning not as a content that can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt is a participatory arena. Through the process of reading we slip out of our customary time orientation, marked by distractedness and surficiality, into the realm of duration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writing in 1994, Birkerts worried that distractedness and surficiality would win out. The \u201cduration state\u201d we enter through a turned page would be lost in a world of increasing speed and relentless connectivity, and with it our ability to make meaning out of narratives, both fictional and lived. The diminishment of literature\u2014of sustained reading, of writing as the product of a single focused mind\u2014would diminish the self in turn, rendering us less and less able to grasp both the breadth of our world and the depth of our own consciousness. For Birkerts, as for many a reader, the thought of such a loss devastates. So while he could imagine this bleak near-future, he (mostly) resisted the masochistic urge to envision it too concretely, focusing instead on the present, in which\u2014for a little while longer, at least\u2014he reads, and he writes. His collection, despite its title, resembles less an elegy for literature than an attempt to stave off its death: by writing eloquently about his own reading life and electronic resistance, Birkerts reminds us that such a life is worthwhile, desirable, and, most importantly, still possible. In the face of what we stand to lose, he privileges what we might yet gain.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A quarter of a century later, did he\u2014did we\u2014manage to salvage the wreck? Or have Birkerts\u2019s worst fears come to pass? It\u2019s hard to tell from the numbers. More independent bookstores<\/a> are opening than closing, and sales of print books are up<\/a>\u2014but authors\u2019 earnings are down<\/a>. Fewer Americans read for pleasure<\/a> than they once did. A major house\u2019s editor-driven imprint was shuttered<\/a> recently, while the serialized storytelling app Wattpad announced<\/a> its intention to publish books chosen by algorithms, foregoing the need for editors altogether. Some of the changes Birkerts saw on the horizon\u2014the invention of e-books, for one, and the possibilities of hypertext\u2014have turned out to be less consequential than anticipated, but others have proven dire; the easy, addictive distractions of the screen swallow our hours whole.<\/p>\n

And perhaps the greatest danger posed to literature is not any newfangled technology or whiz-bang rearrangement of our synapses, but plain old human greed in its latest, greatest iteration: an online retailer incorporated in the same year The Gutenberg Elegies<\/em> was published. In the last twenty-five years, Amazon has gorged on late capitalism\u2019s values of ease and cheapness, threatening to monopolize not only the book world, but the world-world. In the face of such an insidious, omnivorous menace\u2014not merely the tech giant, but the culture that created and sustains it\u2014I find it difficult to disentangle my own fear about the future of books from my fear about the futures of small-town economies, of American democracy, of the earth and its rising seas.<\/p>\n

\u201cTen, fifteen years from now the world will be nothing like what we remember, nothing much like what we experience now,\u201d Birkerts wrote. \u201cWe will be swimming in impulses and data\u2014the microchip will make us offers that will be very hard to refuse.\u201d Indeed, few of us have refused them. As each new technology, from smartphones to voice-activated home assistants, becomes normalized faster and faster, our ability to refuse it lessens. The choice presented in The Gutenberg Elegies<\/em>, between embrace and skepticism, hardly seems like a choice anymore: the new generation is born swaddled in the digital world\u2019s many arms.<\/p>\n

I am both part and not part of this new generation. I was born in 1988, two years before the development of HTML. I didn\u2019t have a computer at home until middle school, didn\u2019t have a cell phone until I was eighteen. I remember the pained beeping of a dial-up connection, if only faintly. Facebook launched as I finished up high school, and Twitter as I entered college. The golden hours of my childhood aligned perfectly with the fading light of a pre-internet world; I know intimately that such a world existed, and had its advantages.<\/p>\n

Birkerts, recalling the power books held over him when he was young, writes, \u201cThrough reading and living I have gradually made myself proof against total ravishment by authors. Yet so vivid are my recollections of that urgency, that sense of consequence, that I foolishly keep looking for it to happen again.\u201d The heightened state brought on by a book\u2014in which one is \u201cactively present at every moment, scripting and constructing\u201d\u2014is what readers seek, Birkerts argues: \u201cThey want plot and character, sure, but what they really want is a vehicle that will bear them off to the reading state.\u201d This state is threatened by the ever-sprawling internet\u2014can the book\u2019s promise of deeper presence entice us away from the instant gratification of likes and shares?<\/p>\n

\u201c[Y]ears of working in bookstores have convinced me that this fundamental condition is there for others as well,\u201d Birkerts writes; as a young man, he worked for a then-independent Ann Arbor bookshop called Borders. Four decades later, I slung books at Literati Bookstore, a few blocks away. The shelves of the original Borders had been bought and repurposed by Literati\u2019s owners to hold the new store\u2019s fiction section, and the people browsing them were the same, too: that is, they had the same tilt to their heads as they scanned titles, the same hopeful reach in their fingers as they pulled a volume down, flipping through the first few pages.<\/p>\n

And if they occasionally wanted books modeled after the internet\u2014gift books born on Tumblr, Instagram printed out and bound\u2014they also wanted Maggie Nelson\u2019s Bluets<\/em>. They wanted Teju Cole\u2019s Open City<\/em>, Anthony Marra\u2019s The Tsar of Love and Techno<\/em>, Claudia Rankine\u2019s Don\u2019t Let Me Be Lonely<\/em>. Loneliness is what the internet and social media claim to alleviate, though they often have the opposite effect. Communion can be hard to find, not because we aren\u2019t occupying the same physical space but because we aren\u2019t occupying the same mental plane: we don\u2019t read the same news; we don\u2019t even revel in the same memes. Our phones and computers deliver unto each of us a personalized\u2014or rather, algorithm-realized\u2014distillation of headlines, anecdotes, jokes, and photographs. Even the ads we scroll past are not the same as our neighbor\u2019s: a pair of boots has followed me from site to site for weeks. We call this endless, immaterial material a feed<\/em>, though there\u2019s little sustenance to be found.<\/p>\n

Birkerts\u2019s argument (and mine) isn\u2019t that books alleviate loneliness, either: to claim a goal shared by every last app and website is to lose the fight for literature before it starts. No, the power of art\u2014and many books are, still, art, not entertainment\u2014lies in the way it turns us inward and outward, all at once. The communion we seek, scanning titles or turning pages, is not with others\u2014not even the others, living or long dead, who wrote the words we read\u2014but with ourselves. Our finest capacities, too easily forgotten.<\/p>\n

Early in The Gutenberg Elegies<\/em>, Birkerts summarizes historian Rolf Engelsing\u2019s definition of reading \u201cintensively\u201d as the common practice of most readers before the nineteenth century, when books, which were scarce and expensive, were often read aloud and many times over. As reading materials\u2014not just books, but newspapers, magazines, and ephemera\u2014proliferated, more recent centuries saw the rise of reading \u201cextensively\u201d: we read these materials once, often quickly, and move on. Birkerts coins his own terms: the deep, devotional practice of \u201cvertical\u201d reading has been supplanted by \u201chorizontal\u201d reading, skimming along the surface. This shift has only accelerated dizzyingly in the time since Engelsing wrote in 1974, since Birkerts wrote in 1994, and since I wrote, yesterday, the paragraph above.<\/p>\n

Horizontal reading rules the day. What I do when I look at Twitter is less akin to reading a book than to the encounter I have with a recipe\u2019s instructions or the fine print of a receipt: I\u2019m taking in information, not enlightenment. It\u2019s a way to pass the time, not to live in it. Reading\u2014real reading, the kind Birkerts makes his impassioned case for\u2014draws on our vertical sensibility, however latent, and \u201cwhere it does not assume depth, it creates it.\u201d<\/p>\n

I no longer have a Facebook account, and I find myself spending less and less time online. As adulthood settles on me\u2014no passing fad, it turns out, but a chronic condition\u2014I\u2019m increasingly drawn back to the deeply engaged reading of my childhood. The books have changed, and my absorption is not always as total as it once was, but I can still find, slipped like a note between the pages, what Birkerts calls the \u201ctime of the self\u2026 deep time, duration time, time that is essentially characterized by our obliviousness to it.\u201d The gift of reading, the gift of any encounter with art, is that this time spent doesn\u2019t leave me when I lift my eyes from the book in my lap: it lingers, for a minute or a day. \u201c[S]omething more than definitional slackness allows me to tell a friend that I\u2019m reading The Good Soldier<\/em> as we walk down the street together,\u201d Birkerts writes. \u201cIn some ways I am <\/em>reading the novel as I walk, or nap, or drive to the store for milk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this thrumming-under quality is also true of our horizontal reading. If I\u2019ve spent too long before the pixelated page, that experience, too, clings to the hours that follow. The screen appears before my closed eyes; my thoughts vibrate at the frequency of content<\/em>, of discourse<\/em>: pithy, argumentative, living in anticipation of retort. I debate imagined trolls in the shower. \u201cWhen a work compels immersion, if often also has the power to haunt from a distance,\u201d Birkerts says, and how I wish this haunting were the sole province of great work. It isn\u2019t: ghosts seep through the words on the screen, ghosts of screeds and inanities, of hate and idiocy, of so much\u2014so much!\u2014bad writing.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut perhaps when the need is strong enough we will seek out the word on the page, and the work that puts us back into the force field of deep time,\u201d says Birkerts. \u201cThe book\u2014and my optimism, you may sense, is not unwavering\u2014will be seen as a haven, as a way of going off-line and into a space sanctified by subjectivity.\u201d Oddly enough, here in the dawning days of 2019, my own optimism is strong. It seems clear to me that the need is strong enough\u2014is as strong as it always has been and always will be\u2014for the blossoming, bodily pleasure of reading something remarkable, the way it takes the top of my head off and shows me\u2014palms open, an offering\u2014what\u2019s been churning away in there, all along.<\/p>\n

\u201cResonance\u2014there is no wisdom without it,\u201d Birkerts writes. \u201cResonance is a natural phenomenon, the shadow of import alongside the body of fact, and it cannot flourish except in deep time.\u201d But time feels especially shallow these days, as the wave of one horror barely crests before it\u2019s devoured by the next, as every morning\u2019s shocking headline is old news by the afternoon. Weeks go by, and we might see friends only through the funhouse mirrors of Snapchat and Instagram and their so-called stories, designed to disappear. Not even the pretense of permanence remains: we refresh and refresh every tab, and are not sated. What are we waiting for? What are we hoping to find?<\/p>\n

We know perfectly well\u2014we remember, even if dimly, the inward state that satisfies more than our itching, clicking fingers\u2014and we know it isn\u2019t here. Here,<\/em> on the internet, is a nowhere space, a shallow time. It is a flat and impenetrable surface. But with a book, we dive in; we are sucked in; we are immersed, body and soul. \u201cWe hold in our hands a way to cut against the momentum of the times,\u201d Birkerts assures. \u201cWe can resist the skimming tendency and delve; we can restore, if only for a time, the vanishing assumption of coherence. The beauty of the vertical engagement is that it does not have to argue for itself. It is self-contained, a fulfillment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mairead<\/span>\u00a0Small Staid is a poet, critic, and essayist living in Minnesota.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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