As someone who grew up with books as an integral part of the their life I was a little bemused by something I noticed last night as I was reading The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr. As I was making my way through the book I suddenly realized that I was surfing through the pages. I literally had to force myself to stop - go back a few pages and start really reading them again.
It turns out hat I hadn’t really missed that much really; but I had missed some things all the same, but the fact that I had to force myself to re-read even a portion of what I had just surfed over irritated me to a certain extent. Here I was a product of a generation where the printed word was something to treasure and here I was skimming over those very same words.
Steve Jobs recently said in a Washington Post interview “the fact is that people don’t read anymore” which immediately raised not only my hackles but also received a lot of attention in a lot of different areas. AS much as I might want to get all cranky over what His Jobness said I have to seriously rethink how I feel after finding myself surfing through a book.
Have we really become a society where reading has become something that we have to concentrate on doing once we open the covers of a book?
In this day and age of blogs and RSS feeds bringing us information at an ever increasing rate we have made skimming; or surfing, the headlines and to a lesser extent the actual content almost second nature. The worrying part of this learning to deal with the constant influx of information is that we are carrying it over into our real world lives.
It would seem that just as we have learned to surf through the Internet we could also be doing the same thing in our lives offline and in turn making things like reading become a lost art.
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