With me? Sure? There are emails to check, then Twitter of course, and Facebook, as well as all those other book blogs. Then the phone’s going off, someone’s left the TV on, there are children/other halves/animals running under your feet. You might resort to sticking on your headphones, but even then you’re just taking them off every two minutes when someone asks you where they left their…whatever. Just how is a person supposed to get any reading done around here anyway?
I’m not really talking about reading a blog post of course, though I myself struggle to finish 500 words sometimes without one of the distractions listed above drawing me away again. I’m talking about getting really stuck into a book, particularly a book that demands you pay attention to what is going on, or else you lose the thread entirely. This is the kind of reading that demands a quiet room and a good couple of hours of your time.
Part of it is the time factor: we all have busy lives, and sometimes taking out time to read can seem positively indulgent when there are so many other jobs to do. After a long day spent reading emails and presentations, my eyes are tired of scanning left to right, and TV or the wireless are much more appealing. But I’ve also noticed recently that I seem to get virtually all my reading done on the commute to work. How has my reading been squeezed and compressed into this hour or so a day - and not exactly the most relaxed hour either?
The answer is revealing: I don’t have the internet on the bus or tube*. At the risk of this blog becoming off-puttingly self-referential, the internet is a terrible thing for attention. One of my favourite tweets (please tell me if this was you) was from someone who said ‘Why do I think I can ‘finish’ reading the internet in the morning?’ And it’s true: links fly in all directions so that you stumble from one place to the next. Everything is trying to grab your attention, your next click, the next comment and opinion. I’m not saying the internet is evil - I’m neither a hypocrite nor a Luddite - just that we’re losing something important if it’s pushing other, perhaps more coherent, forms of information out.
Living with a set of characters and seeing them develop over time. Emotional investment. Following an argument from beginning to end. These are all things that the internet cannot give us. They are the USP of books (and, ok, a really good film). There’s a constant struggle going on in the publishing industry, not just between publishers, but with the myriad of other media - film, TV, and now the internet - on what we can persuade other people to spend their limited time doing. It’s always going to be a tough battle, but books have still got plenty of compelling reasons fighting their corner.
*I’m aware of the existence of these things called ‘iPhones’, but quite apart from my natural neophobic tendencies towards gadgetry (surely the first generation of anything will break as a matter of course?), I want to get some space from the internet just occasionally.
