One Book Closes, Another Phone Opens

e-Book: Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

You might be wondering to yourself, "Am I a robot?" Most likely, you've noticed that your daily routine seems almost robotic. You've broken down every action into a simple formula, an algorithm. In I Have Forgotten How to Read, Michael Harris argues that creators can break down their process into a form of an algorithm. Frequently trained to process and regurgitate the media we consume, are we only capable of creating at the same level we intake?

"What's at stake is not whether we read. It's how we read."

Michael Harris

Some of us remember letting our most vivid imaginations run wild while reading a great novel. We were lost in every page, anticipating the next, as the words opened our minds to something beyond our daily lives. In a quote, Harris states, "old, book-oriented styles of reading opened the world to me, by closing it. And new, screen-oriented styles of reading seem to have the opposite effect. They close the world to us, by opening it." With a world of information at the tap of a screen, we no longer need to read seemingly endless pages of a novel to learn about the world around us. Within seconds of thinking to yourself, "I want to know more about…" you have already opened your phone to browse for the answers. In doing so, we may not have lost our ability to think, but we have certainly hindered our ability to research. Of course, Harris also mentions our capacity for deeper understanding is not about what (or even if) we read, it's about how we read it. Better put, he says we aren't reading less, we're just reading worse. You have an entire digital world at your fingertips. You also have worlds of black-and-white pages waiting for your attention.