Fragmented. Distracted.

So often, that’s our experience of the internet. Whenever I launch a browser, I am assaulted by an overwhelming mudslide of information, headlines, graphics, photos and videos splashing and splurging across the page, each vying for my attention. Clicking over to social media, I’m inundated with a new firehose of topics, tags, talking heads, and Tweets – many of them bitter, angry, or calculated to instill some form of panic, and all written in short, shallow spurts that stymie deep thought and meaningful dialogue.

Only a few minutes into my internet usage, I’ve been exposed to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of distinct ideas and images, flashing before my eyes in mesmerizing and stupefying glow. My mind is diffracted, torn, disorganized. Twenty minutes later, I come to myself after spiraling down a YouTube vortex of people pretending to construct complex swimming pools in dense jungles. How did I get here? What was I supposed to be doing? Ah yes, writing. I settle down to compose, but in a moment of mental block, I take a “break” by checking my email – which is like dynamite blowing up the tracks of my previous train of thought. The human mind is not designed to handle so much information so quickly.

In their classic work “How to Read a Book,” Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren wrote:

We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.

It may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modern communications media has really enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.

Often, to understand a subject more deeply, we need to slow the pace of our thinking. We need to mull, consider and linger. Human wisdom is born of the patient process of contemplation, not the accumulation of “facts” at a rate faster than a machine gun can shoot.

Of course, for most of us, cutting out internet usage entirely is out of the question. But we can place certain limits on it, finding alternative sources of information. There’s another way to think and read, counter to the digital world. It’s called print.

Reading print materials – whether books, magazines, newspapers or journals – is a fundamentally different way to consume information compared to digital media. It makes you think differently, more slowly and methodically. It lowers blood pressure, as it isn’t interactive and can’t bombard you with updates and notifications. There’s also something about holding a physical book in your hands, feeling the texture of its spine and pages, smelling the sweet smell of paper, that grounds and calms you.

Research shows that people engage differently with text on a page as opposed to text on a screen. Reading print significantly improves comprehension – up to eight times more than digital reading – according to researchers at the University of Valencia. “The association between frequency of digital reading for leisure and text comprehension abilities is close to 0,” one of the study’s co-authors, Professor Ladislao Salmerón says.

Why? Salmerón theorizes that “linguistic quality of digital texts tends to be lower than that traditionally found in printed texts,” and that people have a different mindset when consuming digital texts, which often contain less depth than their print counterparts. The reader “doesn’t fully get immersed in the narration, or doesn’t fully capture the complex relations in an informative text.”

Considering this, I’ve recently begun an experiment to try to recover a better way of thinking and reading. I am attempting (more or less successfully) to use the internet only for necessary activities. To replace all the web surfing I used to do, I’ve subscribed to a handful of quality print publications and turned my attention to eating through my massive collection of great books.

Already, I’ve noticed a change. The pace of life feels slower. I’m less stressed because I don’t read all the headlines predicting this or that encroaching disaster. I accomplish my work more quickly, have more free time, and I can concentrate for longer periods of time. I find myself looking forward to the evening hours when I settle on the couch with my stack of books and magazines. And, for the most part, the articles and chapters I’m reading are of a much higher literary and scholarly quality than most of what I’ve encountered online. It’s hard to see a downside.

Let me be clear: there’s a wealth of wonderful content accessible on the internet – like the website you’re currently reading – but, at the same time, most of us could benefit from a little less surfing of the unpredictable internet tides, and a little more time with a book in hand.

—

The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: Freerange Stock