I am a reader. I have been a reader all my life. I will read as long as I can see the words and understand the concepts on the page. I'm reading Daniel C. Dennett's Consciousness Explained, a joyfully dense and nearly impenetrable book about the brain, the mind, and the glorious difference between the two.
I could never read this book on a screen. James Marriott notes, "The entire intellectual infrastructure of modern civilization depends on the kinds of complex thinking inseparable from reading and writing: from serious historical writing to scientific theorems to detailed policy proposals."
Indeed, I find myself reading, rereading, and rereading again passages from Dennett's masterclass in cognition, trying to wring every drop of meaning and knowledge from my reading.
A few decades ago, I read Richard Rhodes's seminal history of the building of the atomic bomb. The Making of the Atomic Bomb was very technical in parts, especially when Rhodes described the work of physicists like Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and Hans Bethe. Bohr's work was crucial. He revolutionized quantum mechanics by introducing the atomic model and the principle of complementarity, laying the foundation for modern quantum theory.
I wanted to understand it. But I had no background in physics. Rhodes wrote a chapter that could have been called "Quantum Mechanics for Dummies." I must have read it 10 times before I was able to grasp the counterintuitive concepts that defined the theory.
You can't easily do that with a screen.
It didn't surprise me to read in James Marriott's article in The Free Press, "The Dawn of the Postliterate Society," that my generation may be one of the last generations to take simple pleasure in reading books.
The 2023 National Assessment of Educational Progress standardized test given to 13-year-olds shows a catastrophic decline in the number of kids who read for fun. In 1984, 35% of 13-year-olds read for pleasure "almost every day." Just 8% almost never read for pleasure.
By 2023, the number of 13-year-olds reading for pleasure every day had fallen off a cliff to just 14%. Meanwhile, the percentage of kids who hardly ever or never read for pleasure had skyrocketed to 31%.
I hate analysts who try to lay blame for a massive problem like this on a single source. But as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, the arrival of the smartphone in 2010 coincides perfectly with the decline in cognitive skills and a worrying rise in psychological disorders.
"Members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data," writes Haidt.
Haidt has been in the forefront of the effort to remove smartphones from schools. But what about the rest of the day? Social media is chock full of addictive algorithms that have captured the young people of the planet and turned them into near-zombies.
For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence. The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading nonfiction—science, history, philosophy, travel writing—we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.
Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations.
Marriott points out, "As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacy, certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing." The more complex the ideas and concepts, the more critical the ability to develop comprehension skills to master them.
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is a good example.
To produce his great work, Kant had to write down his ideas, think about them, refine them, and then rework them over many years so they added up into a persuasive and logical whole. Similarly, to properly understand a book, you have to have it in front of you so you can reread bits you don’t understand, check logical connections, and meditate on important passages until you really take them in.
My memory of first reading that book as a sophomore in high school is not pleasant. Rereading it 15 years later was a revelation. Will children today, who live online and virtually, even want to understand the world, where we came from, how things work, or appreciate good literature?
It's not as simple as taking away their smartphones (they'd simply find another way to get online). Besides, there are positives about smartphones, like allowing kids to have access to any information any time of day and from any source.
As with every other human endeavor, there are pluses and minuses to smartphones. I'm not optimistic. The shallowness and intellectual vapidity of smartphone culture reminds me of the movie Idiocracy, where people in the future have forgotten/never learned how anything works and the world is falling apart.
That's actually a better world than one where a very few people grew up reading books and rule over everyone else. That's a more likely scenario.
