{"id":1294,"date":"2017-11-03T01:22:33","date_gmt":"2017-11-02T22:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=1294"},"modified":"2017-11-03T01:22:33","modified_gmt":"2017-11-02T22:22:33","slug":"thinking-needs-time-and-perhaps-paper-rather-than-screens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/1294\/thinking-needs-time-and-perhaps-paper-rather-than-screens\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking needs time and (perhaps) paper rather than screens"},"content":{"rendered":"

The influence of the internet to our reading habits is not a small matter. Ellopos Blog has published on this in the past and it will continue to seek better understanding of the whole subject. Here follow excerpts from an article by Patrick Kingsley (Guardian).<\/p>\n

Better read slowly – and prefer non-digital, paper books<\/h2>\n

According to The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains<\/a>, a new book by technology sage Nicholas Carr<\/a>, our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. Round-the-clock news feeds leave us hyperlinking from one article to the next \u2013 without necessarily engaging fully with any of the content; our reading is frequently interrupted by the ping of the latest email; and we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.<\/p>\n

Which all means that although, because of the internet, we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual titbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other. And so, as Carr writes, “we’re losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we’re in perpetual locomotion”.<\/p>\n

First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement \u2013 a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask us to switch off our computers every so often and rediscover both the joy of personal engagement with physical texts, and the ability to process them fully.<\/p>\n

“If you want the deep experience of a book, if you want to internalise it, to mix an author’s ideas with your own and make it a more personal experience, you have to read it slowly,” says Ottawa-based John Miedema, author of Slow Reading<\/a> (2009).<\/p>\n

But Lancelot R Fletcher, the first present-day author to popularise the term “slow reading”, disagrees. He argues that slow reading is not so much about unleashing the reader’s creativity, as uncovering the author’s. “My intention was to counter postmodernism, to encourage the discovery of authorial content,” the American expat explains from his holiday in the Caucasus mountains in eastern Europe.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, though the movement began in academia, Tracy Seeley, an English professor at the University of San Francisco, and the author of a blog about slow reading, feels strongly that slow reading shouldn’t “just be the province of the intellectuals. Careful and slow reading, and deep attention, is a challenge for all of us.”<\/p>\n

So the movement’s not a particularly cohesive one \u2013 as Malcolm Jones wrote in a recent Newsweek article, “there’s no letterhead, no board of directors, and, horrors, no central website” \u2013 and nor is it a new idea: as early as 1623, the first edition of Shakespeare’s folio encouraged us to read the playwright “again and again”; in 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche described himself as a “teacher of slow reading”; and, back in the 20s and 30s, dons such as IA Richards popularised close textual analysis within academic circles.<\/p>\n

But what’s clear is that our era’s technological diarrhoea is bringing more and more slow readers to the fore. Keith Thomas, the Oxford history professor, is one such reader. He doesn’t see himself as part of a wider slow community, but has nevertheless recently written \u2013 in the London Review of Books \u2013 about his bewilderment at the hasty reading techniques in contemporary academia. “I don’t think using a search engine to find certain key words in a text is a substitute for reading it properly,” he says. “You don’t get a proper sense of the work, or understand its context. And there’s no serendipity \u2013 half the things I’ve found in my research have come when I’ve luckily stumbled across something I wasn’t expecting.”<\/p>\n

Nicholas Carr’s book elaborates further. “The words of the writer,” suggests Carr, “act as a catalyst in the mind of the reader, inspiring new insights, associations, and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies.” And, perhaps even more significantly, it is only through slow reading that great literature can be cultivated in the future. As Carr writes, “the very existence of the attentive, critical reader provides the spur for the writer’s work. It gives the author the confidence to explore new forms of expression, to blaze difficult and demanding paths of thought, to venture into uncharted and sometimes hazardous territory.”<\/p>\n

Seeley notes that after a conversation with some of her students, she discovered that “most can’t concentrate on reading a text for more than 30 seconds or a minute at a time. We’re being trained away from slow reading by new technology.” <\/p>\n

What’s to be done, then? All the slow readers I spoke to realise that total rejection of the web is extremely unrealistic, but many felt that temporary isolation from technology was the answer. Tracy Seeley’s students, for example, have advocated turning their computer off for one day a week. But, given the pace at which most of us live, do we even have time? <\/p>\n

Miedema insists that, for the true slow reader, there’s simply no substitute for particular aspects of the paper book: “The binding of a book captures an experience or idea at a particular space and time.” And even the act of storing a book is a pleasure for Miedema. “When the reading is complete, you place it with satisfaction on your bookshelf,” he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The influence of the internet to our reading habits is not a small matter. Ellopos Blog has published on this in the past and it will continue to seek better understanding of the whole subject. Here follow excerpts from an article by Patrick Kingsley (Guardian). Better read slowly – and prefer non-digital, paper books According […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[2153,3181,3185,3183,3184,3187,3188,3182,3186],"class_list":["post-1294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","tag-intellectuals","tag-mental-faculties","tag-miedema","tag-nicholas-carr","tag-r-fletcher","tag-reading-habits","tag-shallows","tag-slow-reading","tag-states-of-mind"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}