The Lost Art of Reading

I read a little book this weekend called The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time by David Ulin.  In this little book, Ulin sums up a lot of the problems with society.  We move from one news story to the next without contemplating the story in the bigger picture of things.  We are easily distracted by all the various forms of media.  In the rush to stay up with the latest and greatest, our memory of history is effected.  I love this section from the book:

"to read, we need a certain kind of silence, an ability to filter out noise.  That seems increasingly elusive in our overnetworked society, where every buzz and rumor is instantly blogged and tweeted, and it is not contemplation we desire but an odd sort of distraction, distraction masquerading as being in the know.  In such a landscape, knowledge can't help but fall prey to illusion, albeit an illusion that is deeply seductive, with its promise that speed can lead us to illumination, that it is more important to react than to think deeply, that something must be attached to every bit of time.  Here, we have my reading problem in a nutshell, for books insist we take the opposite position, that we immerse, slow down."  (p. 34)

Ulin's 151 page book brings up a lot of interesting points in regards to how our consumption of information has fragmented the thinking of the general public.  He gives the example of how reading on websites engages the part of our brain that has to do with judgment (which link to click next) and diminishes activity in the part of the brain that has to do with comprehension.  Not to mention that when we click on links from one page to another, we are often reinforcing our own opinion.  Looking for other evidence to support our point of view rather than expand it.

The last point that I thought was interesting had to do with how information presented online is seen as fact, when much of what is posted on blogs and even news sites is very subjective writing that is not always based in fact.  He includes an excerpt from a graduation speech delivered by Barack Obama to make this point.

"Meanwhile you are coming to age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter.  And with iPods and iPads; Xboxes and Playstations - none of which I know how to work- information becomes a distraction , a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment,rather than the means of emancipation." (p. 62)