Moment 53 - Why Doing This Is More Important Than Ever Before: Johann Hari

00:02Why is reading so important? What role does reading play? We all consume information digitally now, why do we need to go back to reading stuff? I think there's a few reasons, um. And it's not, again, not a snooty thing at all. Um, so you're absolutely right that reading is mass reading books has massively declined, um, 57% of Americans now never read a book in any given year. It's the first time in the history of the American Republic that's the case, where' we're still a bit better than that in Britain, but not, not by much.

00:32And there's several people who really helped me to understand this and what that, what that's doing to us. That's partly a symptom of our declining attention and partly a cause of it. And I'll talk a bit about how so to be a woman called professor Ann mangan is at stavanger university in Norway, who's a professor of literacy and probably the leading expert in the world on, on these questions. And she explained lots of things, but there's one very simple one you can do studies have been loads of studies showing this now. So you get group people, you split them randomly into two, the first group, let's say you could do it with my book, you give one group of people my book on the iPad, like your iPad there, and the other group you give the physical book, right? And then you go back to them a week, a month, a year later and you just ask them questions about the book and it turns out.

01:16Invariably the people who've read it on the screen remember significantly less and understand significantly less of what they read. This is a very well proven effect. It's called screen inferiority. It's such a big effect that if you take a 10 year old child, it's the equivalent of two thirds of their progress in reading in a year is lost when they're reading on a screen. It's that's how, that's how much it diminishes our ability to think and it seems to be, there's lots of, there's a big debate about why. But when you read, let's say, uhm, you know, we opened the BBC News site now and you and me read the same story, when we read on a screen, what we tend to do is read in a sort of skimming zed pattern, you sort of skim keywords, right? Boom, boom, boom. When you read a book, generally we read linearly, we read from left to right, you know, and you keep going.

02:07But part of the problem is if you spend too much time reading on screens when you read a book, you start doing that when you read books and it screws with your ability to read books but the truth is I think it's something more subtle, right? So there's this Marshall McLuhan was this kind of professor in the sixties who who said this famous thing that I never understood for years, he said the medium is the message right and what what he meant was. When a new medium comes along, he was talking about television SOA new way of telling stories and thinking about the world comes along. You know you can turn on your television and you can watch the wire or wheel of fortune or anything in between right? The medium of television itself has a message in it right irrespective of the show you're watching on the television.

02:48So the medium of television, the messages, the world is very fast it's all happening at the same time. Uh, we can all think about things you get from watching TV the way you feel if you want and I love TV, things you feel when you when you watch TV. But I think there's a medium in the message of social media, right? So let's think about Twitter. When you open Twitter it doesn't matter if you're Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders or I know Bubba the love sponge right there is a message you are absorbing about how the world should be. I would say the message is firstly the world should be interpreted and thought about very quickly right. quick. quick quick. It should be interpreted very briefly. Anything worth saying can be said in very short little bursts'. binary. and exactly and what matters is.

03:37The thing that is most important is whether people immediately agree with this very fast, very short thing you've said, right? That is the message hidden in the medium of Twitter, right? Think about Instagram, what's the message hidden in the medium of Instagram? It's, um, what really matters is whether you look good. And whether people like how you look, right? That's it, that's the message. What's the message in Facebook? Uh, the message is, okay, friendship, which is the most precious human thing, friendship is looking at other people's photographs of their life, that you should narrate your life to your friends through images and crave their likes, and that that's what friendship is mutually watching each other's carefully collected paparazzi images of each other and liking them now. I think all those messages are wrong.

04:27That is a terrible way to live your life, right? It is not true that life should be interpreted quickly that actually if people immediately agree with what you're saying. What you're saying probably didn't need to be said at all, right? Uhm, yeah, I like pretty people Instagram fine okay, but if that's the thing that you overweight your life towards, something's really gone wrong and friendship, a true friendship is nothing like a Facebook friendship but think about the message. The reason I say this in relation to reading is think about the message in the book, right? The printed book, what does a printed book say to you? Firstly, the world is complicated and you might want to take a good bit of time to think about one thing. Secondly, it says, um, you should slow down.

05:12Slow down, look at this thing that will be saying the same thing a hundred years from now as it says right now, right? And, and thirdly, it says you might want to spend time thinking about the inner lives of other people. Because the inner lives of other people are really interesting and you'll find that they're like you in some ways and unlike you in others, right? So I would say take care what technologies you absorb because over time.

05:38Your consciousness will come to resemble those technologies you know you want have had a life of meaning and purpose where you engage with complex things where you showed empathy, where you showed love. These are not, these are things that the current model of social media absolutely militates against and the books help with. They don't they're not the so you know they're not the sole solution. There's lots of things going on but I deeply believe in the medium of the book.