Even before the digital age, book-lovers were always prone to distraction
Young Girl Reading by Fragonard c 1770 © Wikimedia commons
Attention spans are getting shorter. We no longer have the patience to read properly. The printed codex is a dead technology and the future is browsing ebooks and hyperlinked webpages. Listening to an audiobook isn’t as good as reading a proper book. These are some common arguments you hear. But are they right? Leah Price, an English scholar at Harvard, says we’re too quick to assume that there was a golden age of reading from which we have declined. Prospect’s Sameer Rahim talked to Price about her new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, down the line from America. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.....MUCH MORE
Sameer Rahim: Towards the end of the book, you quote Marshall McLuhan writing in 1966, who listed books as an example of outdated antiques. People have been declaring the end of the book for a while, haven’t they?
Leah Price: When people talk about the death of the book, they’re often talking about two quite different things. One is the death of a particular kind of object that looks and feels and smells a certain way. And the other is a set of practices or activities, which that object has sometimes prompted. You might think of that as the difference between form and function. Personally, I’m not concerned about the survival of the object; I am very concerned about the survival of those human practices or activities.
SR: There’s this myth of an ideal reader, isn’t there?
LP: In the digital age we think of someone reading a printed book curled up in bed or sprawled under a tree, reading for pleasure, probably some classic work of imaginative literature. But for most of the history of printed books, that kind of reading has been distinctly in the minority. If you asked people in Britain or in the US a generation ago what book they had in their house, the most common answers would have been a Bible and a telephone book. So when we blame the absence of printed books for the distraction and the impatience and superficiality of the digital world, it’s unfair. We’re comparing an ideal scenario of print reading with a more realistic assessment of digital reading. We kid ourselves if we think that the presence of printed books would magically make us more attentive and more focused.
SR: On social media, you see people posting pictures of themselves reading or piling up the hardbacks they’ve read that month. It’s a performance of a kind of bookish identity, if you will.
LP: If you look at the Kindle icon that Amazon came up with, it’s the image of someone sitting under a tree in this beautiful natural setting absorbed in a book. Whereas a lot of book reading historically has happened on trains and buses, or while waiting in line at the doctor’s office. When we idealise the printed book, we are really idolising a certain kind of self, the kind of reader that we wish we were. Just as we tend to externalise our vices on to digital devices—“it’s not that I’m impatient, it’s that the phone makes me impatient.” One function of a history of reading is to serve as a corrective to nostalgia, for a path that was limited to a few decades. In the 20th century, when literacy was high, books were cheap. And there were not yet as many other media competing for our time and attention. What stands in the way of our reading great literature is almost never the medium; it’s almost always time. It’s about what other activities we need to give up in order to read.
SR: Readers of previous generations might have been as time-stretched or as keen on browsing as we are. I was reminded of a quote from Samuel Johnson: “A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?”
LP: The vast majority of printed books in the past were not great works of imaginative literature made to be read from cover to cover. They were encyclopaedias, and dictionaries and catalogues. So one thing that we’re mourning when we mourn the printed book is a certain kind of passivity or receptivity, a model of reading in which you open the book and just let it wash over you. But Dr Johnson was of course both a wonderfully omnivorous and a wonderfully disrespectful reader, who jumped around and skipped and skimmed and had no shame about these things. Readers tend to zigzag and skip their way through a book, and that’s quite similar to our current online life of browsing and searching....
