2 minute read
Have you noticed this phenomenon of literate people who can’t read anything more than 256 characters? A growing number of readers are constitutionally incapable of getting immersed within a book. That focused attention is gone. Instead written text is shallowly skimmed with minimal comprehension.1 Even the highly educated with advanced degrees have often been conditioned to consume written language in distracted fragments. This inability to do “deep reading” is a result of social media and how we’re trained by our phones. It’s the Twitter Effect.
The Twitter Effect is part of a growing bias against written word in our increasingly post-literate society. Websites like ESPN moved away from journalistic articles to video clips. College students graduate without checking out a single book. Book clubs watch documentaries instead of reading biographies. Verbal communication is perceived to be more human. People are defensive and presume malice when an email has substantial text. They say written text doesn’t contain tone because they’re poor readers who don’t pick up on idiosyncrasies. It’s all the same transition.
Those of us who are in love with written word despise every bit of that. As someone with learning disabilities that include slow processing speed, I’m hosed. I express myself vastly better in writing than in spoken word, so, when I care about someone or something, I communicate in writing. That means slowly taking my reader’s perspective into account and carefully selecting the exact words to convey a particular meaning and express a particular tone. It’s an act of love, but people now get instantaneously pissed, assume the worst, and cannot be bothered to do more than skim.
This is an area where I cannot single out Christian culture from the trends in the broader society, but I’ve had a lot of these problems in faith communities. I’m talking about situations like getting reamed out by pastors with M.Divs who spazzed because they didn’t read the “excessive” 300-word, 3-paragraph emails and theology book study participants who murder the quality of the discussion because they never, ever do the damn reading.2 Honestly, I find it nearly impossible to have deep fellowship or close relationships with literate Christians who don’t/won’t read.
The original beatniks were readers and writers. A profuse love for written language was at the heart of everything in their countercultural movement.3 There’s no such thing as a Beat who isn’t passionate about written word, so the idea of using “beatnik” as the adjective without a strong commitment to written communication is utterly nonsensical. An avid love for written language must be intrinsic to any beatnik-infused, Jesus-centered spirituality. Beatnik Christianity by definition involves a countercultural resistance to the post-literate direction of society.
Author
Check out Maryanne Wolf’s books Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain and Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. Both titles explore the neuroscience of the brain during the process of reading.↩
Yes, that’s pastors with an “s” (plural). Yes, I’ve actually had a bunch of different clergy refer to emails that would take maybe 90 seconds to carefully read as excessive. It’s not that people can’t read. It’s that they won’t. There’s absolutely no consideration that maybe some people communicate better in writing even if they’ve explicitly told you exactly that. That reality is apparently culturally inconceivable.↩
As the opening line on Wikipedia says, “The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era.”↩
