Does anyone actually still read books in 2022? Forget books –does anyone even still read blogs in 2022?
Going even further, does anyone read anything longer than a web page in 2022? Maybe that’s the more appropriate question. I started reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows a few weeks ago (spoiler alert/confession: I scanned the final four chapters because I lost interest), and since then I’ve been questioning how much and how permanently not just society’s reading habits have changed, but my own have as well.
Sure, most of us spend multiple hours behind a glowing screen or carry one around with us all day, but does that kind of reading even count? One of Carr’s main arguments is that the convenience and pervasiveness of the internet has harmed our ability to focus on longer, more complex reading tasks. Instead of sitting at the breakfast table behind a newspaper (which is really, I suppose, another type of scan-reading), or instead of reading a book in the recliner on Saturday afternoon or in the evening after supper, we get our hits of information from short bursts of reading. Snatches of ideas. Little snacks of information rather than balanced meals of knowledge that come with reading whole books or reading multiple pieces on a given subject. In addition to losing our collective attention span, what we’ve lost –and what I see as the biggest danger– is context.
And just as deep reading in context is lost, what I see from my own personal internet habits since I’ve returned home for work is the ability to write well. I’ve seemed to forget how writing is HARD. Well, good writing is hard. First-draft blogs like this one are less hard, but even now, I’m realizing that while I started out with a germ of an idea, it’d have been far better to have built even a sketch of an outline. What do I want to say? What’s the point, anyway? I’m not sure I could’ve answered when I typed the tentative title.
I’ve abandoned Facebook for about two years now, but I’ve kept an on-again, off-again Twitter account, and that also is an entirely different sort of first-draft writing. I don’t really feel the need a plan to compose 280 characters or less on what I did last weekend or to blurt out a reaction to the latest outrage trigger. –Of course, I try to avoid the latter. A growing annoyance with contextless outrage posting was the main reason for abandoning Facebook and the reason I have an arms-length, skeptical relationship with my Twitter account. How much can you really change the world for the better with a 280 character post, anyway? I suppose it’s been done, but I struggle to find an example.
While I’ve heard many writers (especially in the early days of Twitter) claim that the 280 character limit is a helpful constraint and good practice at building maximal meaning in a minimum of words, what it’s done for me is far more insidious. I find that after dropping several of the writing habits I kept during my undergraduate classes and my MFA (daily journaling, regular deep reading, revision), I now tend to prefer the lazy route. Most of what I’ve written since May has been half-hearted morning pages every few days when I feel like it and a couple Twitter responses or posts a day. Not surprisingly, writing a longer piece now seems insufferably difficult. I started two pieces in the last few months in the old-fashioned manner, pen and paper to try and get my groove back, and I’m finding that what I end up with is something more like a jumble of disjointed notes than a cohesive first-draft of an actual essay. Things go all over the place. I typically hit my stride (and figure out my “what’s this really about”) around page three, … and then I lose the energy and focus to continue. I leave a bulleted list of possible future paragraph points and I tell myself I’ll come back to it later. And then when I do, I’m so disgusted by my lack of coherence that I abandon what I have and follow a different path.
Some might call this writer’s block. What this ramble is telling me, however, is not that I’m blocked. I’m out of shape.
As to what’s caused that, I’m not certain that I can solely blame the internet. Sure, my habits there don’t help matters at all, but there’s something else going on, and I think the answer lies in a lack of discipline overall. I’ve reestablished the habit of a daily walk, and found I’d forgotten how much the combination of physical activity, getting outdoors, and being able to listen through the noise in my head helps me see things more clearly. I’m forcing myself as I write this to finish my idea, something I rarely do any more through my morning pages. I know that morning pages aren’t supposed to have a point, necessarily, but I’ve been so frustrated with the lack of direction that’s shown up there that I’ve nearly abandoned the practice. It’s not the morning pages, though, just like it wasn’t just the internet or even just social media. It’s a bigger problem of losing the practice of doing deep work. Of paying attention. Of remembering why I do this. Without ideas, writing is pointless, and I think therein lies my problem: good ideas come at a cost. They require focus and discipline and work to wrangle them into words that have power to change things for the good.
At the risk of unwinding my whole point here with cheesy nostalgia, here’s where I insert the clip from my childhood memories of Debbie Allen from Fame since this came to mind, and I’ll end my ramble here for today.
