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Tim Gray, writing in the New York Reviews of Books, has a very interesting article that asks whether it has become impossible to find the uninterrupted blocks of time that are needed to read serious works of literature, and whether the change in the reading environment is also changing how books are written.
Ordinarily I ignore the "Computer Bad! Destroy Society!" arguments, but I have to say that what he describes seems all too familiar. I can't recall the last time that I actually sat down for two or three hours just to read.
I grew up spending hours each day, every day devouring books of all sorts. Is this a thing that's lost to people raised with Internet, Game Consoles, and Smartphones? Pardon me if I sound like an old fart.
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Is Always On Tech Destroying Our Ability To Read?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 16 2014, @05:30PM
It's not the technology's fault that people misuse it, so no, "always on tech" is not destroying our ability to read: people's misuse of it is. Studies have shown reading a physical book leads to better reading comprehension. People using morse code or tweets or texts or likes or whatever rather than engage in conversation is the problem, not morse code or twitter or texts or facebook. More people meet on match.com now than face-to-face. Society's changing, in some ways for the worse, but it seems inevitable since we'll all be uploaded to machines anyway.