Google the following phrase from Steve Jobs: “The fact is people don’t read anymore”, and you will find at least 2660 results. Does anyone see the irony of this assertion, appearing as it does in a growing body of literature, including printed books – literature that ostensibly gets read by people?
In the January, 2012 issue of Christianity Today, John Wilson began a short piece entitled “Don’t Worry, Read Happy” with the Jobs quote. His piece is an author interview with Alan Jacobs who recently authored The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.
Jacobs, a professor of English at Wheaton College (Illinois), believes we ought to read more books for the sheer delight they bring. He may be unique among contemporary educators because he does not allow laptops in his classroom. As for the reason, he tells John Wilson:
I decided some years ago that I was not going to allow laptops in the classroom. And the main reason was actually not because of the distractions involved, though they are multiple. I will walk sometimes down the halls of Wheaton and I’ll look into a classroom, and I’ll see a student sitting in the back of the room clearly doing Facebook or playing Solitaire or involved in some sort of game while the teacher is talking, and I know that that person has only minimal attention. So I’m aware of that as a problem, and I don’t want my students to have that problem.
But I actually banned laptops for a different reason. There’s a technology that we call the book, and many of us tend to assume that, well, everybody knows how to use books. Books are easy. It’s the modern technologies that students need to be trained to use effectively. And I think, No, not really. A book is actually not that easy to know how to use well, especially for young people who haven’t formed the habit of attending carefully to how they work.
Jacobs believes engaging the printed word in a book eliminates much of the distraction that comes from modern technology.
I’ve been thinking about this matter of technological distraction, and while I love my Logos Bible study software and enjoy researching online resources such as Christian Classics Ethereal Library, to name just one of innumerable online repositories, I believe Jacobs is correct.
Sometime ago, when writing a review article of several Bible study software packages, I said that these programs enable one to misinterpret Scripture at speeds before thought impossible. In my experience, I find I am too often more enamored with the speed with which I accumulate information than I am in reflecting on the information at hand. Are we creating a technologically savvy generation, adept at collecting more information than could be absorbed in several lifetimes, but poverty-stricken in the ability to focus and think deeply on specific themes?
Speaking further on the theme of reading, Jacobs says:
To read is not just to scan your eyes across the page but to know it by heart, and then to speak it to others….That’s the whole trajectory of the reading experience…
It is time to slow down, to learn how to read slowly and reflectively. And let’s do it for the sheer joy of reading.
Purchase The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction now.
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Pastor David Pitman (follow him on Twitter – @PastorPitman) has written a very fine piece called Top Ten Myths About Bullies over at Exception Noted.
