Do people still read? Will there be people in the future who will read? Are we too distracted, disinterested, content to bother? Do we need everything to talk to us, show us, wash over and drown out all senses in frivolous entertainment and spectacle? Is it all okay and will we be fine? Am I too cynical? Am I overreacting? I can’t help but think that reading is something that’s past its time. A weird habit future generations won’t understand, or worse, laugh at for being old fashioned.
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Reading is becoming a niche hobby. It’s the kind of thing people do behind closed doors, away from prying eyes; a form of protest; a pseudo-religious rite of a long forgotten sect of an unknown tribe. Nobody wants the mob to deem them nerds or social pariahs. When was the last time you saw a couple of lepers debating the finer points of a book everyone has read?
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The other day I was thinking about His Master’s Voice and wondering about our masters. I realized it’s not something we seem to spend much time thinking about, investigating, or even acknowledging. We want to have agency. We crave comfort. We don’t want to be inconvenienced with any consideration of the voice in the back of all of our heads convincing us we need that other thing, that other entertainment, that next suggestion, that next bite-sized dopamine filled diversion. I think our masters are talking all the time and we’ve committed to not listening.
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I think it’s strange when we neglect to consider the trade-offs of technological advancement. We never consider what may be lost or what our worst enemy could do with that thing we hold up for worship. Everything is an inevitable convenience and we’re powerless when standing in its way.
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I find cultural numbness interesting. It’s curious how there are people who can rattle off the most random and arcane sports statistics. It’s strange how millions of people know which celebrity is dating who, what performative antic is trending on social media, and which reality television personality is the patron of which consumer product. A lot of information has to be tuned out for those factoids to make their way in.
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Sometimes I wonder if the publishing industry is complicit. It’s like the act of publishing is an end in itself. A vanity project that produces only a physical object whose pages could be blank and still have the same affect. Who wants to read the ghostwritten musings of a B political actor or reality star plucked from obscurity and using every avenue available to cash in before the spotlight moves? Who has the mettle to consume those pages when their master has already told them it’s time for the next thing. It’s a paradox wrapped in a shrinking cycle of attention.
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Will the future nerds and outcasts who still read in tucked away places be able to discern the difference between a genuine human mind trying to connect with an unknowable face through the power of words formed into a flowing cadence of sentences and paragraphs – meanings hidden in hints and allusions – from the robotic vacuum of language sucked into a machine, jumbled, then spat back out in due course.
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Were all of those science-fiction stories about banning books, censoring them, burning them, wrong about us? Did we just need a multitude of ubiquitous distractions and competing entertainments to render the the thought of sitting in one place, reading a long piece, so distasteful, so distressful that we would just choose not to do it? Maybe we’re writing our own dystopian narrative now. Maybe our future selves will look back and wonder why this moment wasn’t a dystopian trope.
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Maybe we only have time, patience, and appetite for tiny snippets of information; fleeting thoughts distilled into minimal waves of sound that evoke bare emotions disconnected from the underlying text. Words transmuted into only song. Maybe a broadside distilled into a series of bullet points can be an ear worm that resonates. I’m only ever guessing.
GLAZ 