Why The Written Word Will Never Die
The hot new theory online is that reading is kaput, put a fork in it…DONE! And therefore, civilization is done, as well. To be fair, the late, great, please read everything he ever wrote, Harold Bloom, first raised these concerns decades ago. Ironically, people are only now hopping on the bandwagon. What do you mean, Boss ? Well, let me tell you, my bird- and mouse-eating companion; it goes something like this: The rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies has shattered our attention spans and extinguished our taste for text. Books are disappearing from our culture, and so is our capacity for complex and rational thought…because those are precisely the things that deep reading fosters. We are careening toward a post-literate society, where myth, intuition, faith (yes, I said “faith”), and emotion replace logic, evidence, and science. Trust me…nobody needs to bomb us back to the Stone Age; we have decided to line up and walk there ourselves. Even as I...