Anyway, here's what happened to inspire this little missive. I was serving jury duty last week and, like many prospective jurors, brought a book because if you only know one thing about jury duty, it's that you're going to sit around for a good chunk of at least one day so you might as well bring something to read. Or at least, that's what people in my generation know about jury duty. That was before smart phones. I read most of one chapter (a chapter which I still haven't finished), but that was only after I'd spent a good hour, maybe more, on Twitter and Google News--mostly catching up on what I'd missed by not watching the Golden Globes Awards the night before--and at least half as long checking email and texting. It's not as though I thought at the time this was a horrible waste of time, either, and couldn't wait to get to my book. In fact, I even tweeted to that effect:
Last time I had jury duty, I didn't have internet access with me. This way is better, even if I never get around to the book I brought.
— KingTor (@KingTor) January 14, 2013
That wasn't my first tweet of the morning and there were 5 more before I even thought seriously about the book. And that's when I got to thinking about it. It was pretty obvious to me that the time I spent online was less rewarding than the time I spent reading my book, and yet I still chose willfully to tweet instead of read.
And here's the sad thing: I'm not the only one who lost out in that experience. There's a whole society built around the written word, and we humans have been building that society for literally thousands of years. Well, maybe the time before the printing press is different enough that it should be counted as a separate era of society, so say hundreds of years. No matter, it's been going on for awhile. I'm not really worried about ebooks destroying that society, although I've never really read an ebook, so maybe I will be worried about that some day. But not that day. On that day, I started wondering how much reading was lost to "smart" phones every day, and started wondering about the cumulative effect on society--not so much on the publishing business as on the collective knowledge we possess, and our collective capacity for literary truth/beauty.
So I don't know if I'm going to do anything differently because of this mini-epiphany. I'd like to say I will, but it's pretty telling that I still haven't even finished the chapter I started that day, a full week ago, and I only had 2 short paragraphs left.
