Reading is work, but it’s the only way to figure out complex issues

In a recent conversation with a friend, it really hit home how important the ability to concentrate long enough to read and deeply understand information has become.

This is none more apparent than in the business I’m in, reading and writing, where the brevity of 30-second ­video clips is claiming valuable concentration territory. Even as I’m writing this, I am having to navigate filtering notifications from my phone messages, emails and social media all vying for my immediate attention.

However, the thing about reading is that it stimulates your own individual thoughts. It doesn’t impose other people’s prepackaged opinions on any particular topic on you, which is what we often find in social media commentaries via videos and images with supposedly thoughtful life quotes and analyses claiming to be sage knowledge.

These commentaries are all pretty flat because they represent passive interactions that lack complexity and don’t stimulate much thought, but instead they strike an emotional chord. They lack the necessary grappling with the “why” and rather just rest on “vibes”, as the kids say.

Much has been written about how our technological immersion is to blame for the decline in attention spans and people turning away en masse from long-form reading and its demands on the brain’s ability to reason.

Those of us who were not born into a world with smartphones or ready access to computers got our information and made sense of the world through reading things like encyclopaedias and good old books. They drew us into a world of imagination, of figuring out complex issues using our own brain capacity.

There is a reason for warnings about the amount of screen time people spend on their devices. When I was growing up it was just television, but now there are also smartphones, tablets and computers that steal valuable time from using your brain and making discoveries independently.

Now, instead of learning how to cook by following a written recipe and figuring it out through trial and error, you can just watch a YouTube video. Instead of battling through a literary opus and making your own deductions as to the author’s use of techniques and your interpretation of the work, you can just google a summary.

But a much more scientific explanation offered in Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf, a scholar and advocate for children’s literacy, is that the ability to engage in long-form reading rewires our brains, increasing vocabulary, shifting brain activity towards the analytic left hemisphere and honing our capacity for concentration, linear reasoning and deep thought.

Wolf’s assertion also informed an article in The New York Times by journalist Mary Harrington, in which she soberly notes that an “electorate that has lost the capacity for long-form thought will be more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories”.

I think this is something worth wrestling with as we claw back the luxury that concentration and the ability to think have become, especially in the fight against misinformation, disinformation and the campaign against intellectualism. DM

Zukiswa Pikoli is Daily Maverick’s managing editor for Maverick Citizen and news.

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.