The End of Books

By Scott Ferrier, MJ • Phoenix, AZ

Recently I read some intriguing literature and studies on what the Internet is doing to our minds. We are developing, unawares, mental habits which are preventing us from truly “inhabiting” a great classic of literature, for example, or listening for the Word of God to us from the sacred page in lectio divina.

In his best-selling book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, author Nicolas Carr takes us back to the nineteenth century when the death of books was announced with the introduction of the newspaper. Newspapers, magazines, journalism all evolved, yet books did not go away. At the start of the twentieth century, Thomas Edison’s phonograph again brought predictions of the demise of books. Yet books in this earlier time continued to be written and found their way into the marketplace.

A century later, “the death of books” sounded again with the arrival of the electronic age. Today, there has been a fundamental shift in society’s attitude with the explosion of e-books and readers, computers, and the Internet making their way into the universities and encroaching upon everyday life. “Surfing the web” is considered by ever-increasing numbers of people to be a good substitute for deep reading despite its proven, radical effect on the act of thinking.

Anne Nicole in the journal “Educause Review” reports that research and tests have shown that comprehension decreases when students interface with digital devices when compared to print. Why? For many reasons. We the readers are skimming and scanning, taking shortcuts. We browse selectively and read things once before moving on. Worse still, we become aware that we haven’t a clue as to what we just read and are forced to double-back to catch the author’s train of thought! We are multitasking, dividing our focus. In the effort to save time, students are actually taking more time to read an electronic page than one in print. Recent major studies are revealing that “paper readers” consistently demonstrate better recall and comprehension.

These observations may alert us to watch our own consumption of the digital page. To express this in a spiritual sense, we second the recommendation of Hans Urs Von Balthasar “who insisted that we must build “islands of humanity” in this world dominated by the machine, by technique” (from Word and Silence by Raymond Gawronski, SJ).

With technology, just because we can do it, doesn’t mean that we should.