Hey! Is Reading Hard for You?
The subject of this issue is precisely what I want to ask you about: reading. Specifically, reading anything that might take more than ten minutes to do so or something whose scrollbar on a page makes you reconsider if you have time to do so. I wrote what prompted this thought on my blog and as I wrote this, I got an update from the Verge about browser makers forcing AI into their services although no feature development of browsers - let alone in general tech - is consensual with its utilizers, but that's for a different piece. It's not lost on me that, despite the constant updates around the dangers of AI, big tech is still aiming to force these obviously abusive things on it. But again, that's for experts to speak on, you should follow the work of the DAIR Institute (and about the founder's journey). It is a bit alarming that the proliferation of services we're forced to use (you can't switch the Web browser engine on mobile devices, so you're always using Safari).
What does that have to do with reading? Well, a lot of my peers tend to be those who are "digital adopters", the youth of the folks that grew up with the evolution of the Internet - the AOL and MSN messenger in junior high school folks. We're kind of used to being online. But we're also of the generation that read a lot. Many of us could aimlessly point to how George H. W. Bush's No Child Left Behind led to my generation not being that plugged into reading - and you wouldn't be completely wrong. The gamification of education leads to more losers than anything else, and in a capitalist society, no one wants to be a loser. Any sort of educational system that reduces the value of self-education, systems around critical thinking, self-discovery and exploratory reading, can weaken the ability of this youth to then find interest in those behaviors as they get older. Tying that in with a generation of parents who are, like their predecessors, overworked and potentially too tired to add to the necessary education of their youth will fall into this trap. I was one of those youth - who enjoyed reading in school, but immediately discarded it as I got older because "that shit wasn't making me paper."
How did I "get better" at reading? I had to retrain and teach myself the value of it once again. It had to be things I was already going to find some interest in. Comic books at my local library helped me a lot. What ironically kicked it into high gear for me was getting an unintentional copy of Game Informer (when they still had that in print - I still have print copies). I wasn't aware that people wrote essays about games I'd love to play and also couldn't afford to play, so it immediately led me to find more outlets - both online and off - about games, reigniting my interest in reading more long form content. If you don't know this by now, my highest form of formal education has come from high school - and a transfer one at that. I wasn't given that form of collegiate structure to be exposed to many forms of literature, and my high school prior to the transfer didn't encourage anything outside the Anglo-centric forms of literature America strongly suggests you consume for "scholarly prestige" (fuck Catcher In the Rye - that single-handedly almost made me hate books).
I'm writing this as a bit of a warning; the means of self-education in this age of massive streams of information is going to get a bit trickier, especially as more content is both generated and condensed (and generated again) by companies whose main prerogative is to get you to click on a link for some affiliate kickback. It's worse than not being to opt out of an ad; you don't even know if the content you're reading anymore was written by a machine with the intent to get you to buy something (a book, course, bag, cookie) at the end of it. I hope that this encourages you to pick up something fun to read or something serious and use it as an excuse to put your devices on "Do Not Disturb". We deserve the ability to choose. And I hope you choose to read.