On a Sunday full of possibilities, I am colonised by the dementors of too much choice. I unlock my mobile phone, and a dawn of overwhelming choices breaks — movies, music, podcasts, games — it perplexes me. Amidst my indecision, a dust-ridden copy of The Bell Jar falls from the bookshelf. The bile of guilt rises to my throat. But in the end, I find myself afloat in a reassuring puddle of intoxicating cat videos online.
In a hyperconnected world, where everything is at the distance of a click, books are left to age pale yellow. With heads buried in virtual graves, the newer generations often see reading as mundane. Though the benefits of reading are common knowledge, the privilege of choice makes other easily consumable media seem the low-hanging fruit of entertainment. Today, reading rests in a coffin — at the cusp of its funeral. The escalating discontinuance of magazines, publishers and bookstores worldwide is a testament to how rare readers are becoming.
The blast of the digital has reduced everything to short and swallowable — even literature. Gen Z has made literature undergo a metamorphosis, catering to their sinking attention spans. From Instagram poetry to captions to tweets, the reading fabric of Gen Z is brief — and so is its impact. They are reading rapidly and recklessly, and the dangers of little knowledge are not concealed. Long-form reading is now confined to the consumption of information for academic and institutional work. Reading for the sole bliss of the act seems to be archived in the halls of history. We are reverting to times when only an elite ‘reading class’ consumes long-form texts — this is regression as a society. Though digital reading might be a new avenue for words, studies suggest that reading printed text develops better comprehension than reading on a screen.
The Ljubljana Reading Manifesto of October 2023 rightly argues that digital societies might have fostered reading more than ever in terms of textual information consumed; still, such reading is ‘superficial’ and confined to mere text decoding. The manifesto furthers the notion of ‘higher-level reading’. Higher levels of reading help cultivate better cognitive abilities, attention span and vocabulary. Reading long-form pieces leads to enhanced conceptualisation and challenges one’s perception of the world. We live in an age where fake news has become as common as polluted air. And the much-required ability to distinguish between fact and fiction can only be developed by critical literacy skills and reading comprehension.
Gen Z has become the flag-wavers of the mental health discourse. Literature has a part to play there, too. It’s well established that reading fiction helps fuel empathy and allows us to connect better with those unlike us, thereby promoting inclusivity. Books are also an agency for escapism — they let us seek a transient refuge from the tangles of life. Escapist fiction opens the doors to other worlds and lets us be a part of them. On the other hand, non-fiction offers detailed strategies to combat mental health issues and helps us manage ourselves better.
Our histories have been constituted upon stories told, retold and preserved. The medium to conserve narratives is language. Language enables us not only to communicate but also to express ourselves. It’s an inter-cultural flow that often borrows words from borderlands and transmits our minds to the world around us. But in a society where people cease to read, language itself becomes endangered. And preserving it becomes paramount. The only way we can save language is through literature — by employing language to write more and then re-employing it to read more.
Literature has always been a gateway to imagination. It makes us live the lives of others and experience things we might not witness in our own lives. When we enter stories, we create worlds, sketch characters and sense emotions. We use language to transcend borders and travel the globe and beyond. Reading is our passport to everywhere. It is an exercise for the imagination. To surrender reading is a refusal to imagine, which in turn is a sacrifice of our creative abilities — the very essence of being human.
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