Blogging and reading
Sherry’s Sunday Salon post touches on how the computer has influenced the way she reads. I can relate to what she says:
I think my reading has been negatively impacted by the computer. I love blogging and computers and the internet. I’m not an anti-technology person. But I find myself skimming and rushing through books lately because, I think, I am so much more aware of all of the books that I want to read. I have to get through them fast because there are so many good books out there yet to read. Of course, that attitude isn’t conducive to good, relaxed enjoyment of the book I am reading right now.
I wanted to think about that here for a minute. I’m not sure that for me, it’s about wanting to get through a book in order to get to the next one. But I do notice that my reading is more superficial than it once was.
When I read Sherry’s post, I thought (again) about how slowly I used to make my way through a book. I would copy out passages here and there into notebooks. I would stop and reflect. But since I’ve started blogging, I notice two things. One is that I have this personal goal to write a review a week. So reading becomes a bit of a race: I want to finish a book a week and write about it. Even if it means I don’t have time to stop and think about it. Even if I get to the end and have many trains of thought that need to be resolved if I want to deal with them in writing. Or even if, as sometimes happens, I haven’t been especially moved by the book at all.
At one level, my blog is a record of what I’ve read. I love that. I love that I can look back and read my review of this or that book and remember it. This blog is a much more systematic record of my reading than I ever kept before I started blogging.
But on the other hand, though it is more “complete” in the sense that every title gets categorized, it’s less complete in the sense that it doesn’t represent the whole reading experience — and it even has flattened out the reading experience by “rushing” me. (Some folks can read much faster than a book a week, but that’s basically a reading sprint for me.) I no longer have my commonplace books scattered around the house. And often, I find that my blog posts replace my deeper memories of a book. It’s kind of like the way snapshots or home movies can replace your memories of certain events you’ve lived through. The brain appropriates the visual image and tosses the lived experience. With books, I’m finding that my brain appropriates the written documentation of reading, and tosses the (often deeper and more complicated) experience of reading.
I’m reminded of a passage in The Shallows. Nicholas Carr is examining the development of writing as a technology, and he reaches back to Plato’s Phaedrus in the fourth century B.C. It contains a dialogue within a dialogue; in a discussion between Socrates and Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about a dialogue between the Egyptian god Theuth (who invented the alphabet) and the Egyptian king Thamus.
I’m going to quote a couple of paragraphs of Carr’s discussion, and let it be the last word in this post. We’re quick to judge the computer or the printing press or the combustion engine as “technologies,” but what’s fascinating about this passage is the way Carr helps us to see that writing itself is a technology, one that has (as he indicates elsewhere) some wonderful benefits on the way we think, but one that initially had its critics as well:
Theuth describes the art of writing to Thamus and argues that the Egyptians should be allowed to share in its blessings. It will, he says, “make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories,” for it “provides a recipe for memory and wisdom.” Thamus disagrees. He reminds the god that an inventor is not the most reliable judge of the value of his invention: “O man full of arts, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them. And so it is that you, by reason of the tender regard for the writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect.” Should the Egyptians learn to write, Thamus goes on, “it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of “external marks.” The written word is “a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance.” Those who rely on reading for their knowledge will “seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing.” They will be “filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom.”
Socrates, it’s clear, shares Thamus’s view. Only a “simple person,” he tells Phaedrus, would think that a written account “was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters.” Far better than a word written in the “water” of ink is “an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner” through spoken discourse. Socrates grants that there are practical benefits to capturing one’s thoughts in writing — “as memorials against the forgetfulness of old age” — but he argues that a dependence on the technology of the alphabet will alter a person’s mind, and not for the better. By substituting outer symbols for inner memories, writing threatens to make us shallower thinkers, he says, preventing us from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness.
Carr goes on to point out how Plato, who writes Phaedrus, obviously sees benefits to writing, and he goes from there into a discussion of what they are. If you’re curious, I recommend finding a copy of The Shallows.
