ICM501 Blog

By: Jack Weiman

I Have Forgotten How to Read

After reading the text “I have forgotten how to read”, I realized that I was not the only person who struggles with these problems. The article talks about how we are gradually moving in the direction where we all become worse at reading. It shouldn’t really come as that much of a shock, considering most of us are aware of a large amount of negative effects social media has on our brains. It makes even more sense for my generation, I am 20, because we grew up with the internet and social media. However, what surprised me the most was that it is even affecting generations of people who grew up before the internet was ever a thing. The author talks about how he believed that his childhood of reading books the old-fashioned way would protect him from the new way of life in our society, in relation to media intake. However, now, he says that the mind is plastic and he has adapted for the worse, as he cannot read the way he used to.

Because we spend so much time on social media and the internet, we have become familiar with getting and reading information exactly when we want it. We have the ability to scroll, search up what we want, and manage our feeds to give us the information that we want to see. Because of this, our attention span has decreased severely and it makes reading books in a consistent manner much more of a challenge. Even while I was reading this article, I would catch myself getting distracted so easily and having to go back a few lines to re-read sentences.

Just because we are becoming worse readers doesn’t necessarily mean that we aren’t reading as much. In all honesty, I believe that we are actually reading more. When we use any social media really, we are always reading. It doesn’t matter if it is Instagram and we are reading captions, twitter and we are reading endless tweets, or even texting, which we all do very frequently. It seems that since we have been adapting to read so fast and frequently, we are becoming more passive readers which is why I think that we are struggling to read books like we were once able to. I had always considered myself a good reader, but a slow reader. Now, it is starting to feel like I read faster, but take in less information. I don’t know if it is even something that we can fix at this point. Maybe it’s just the way that humanity is evolving and books might even be left in the past eventually.