The Life and Death of Deep Reading

I used to be able to sit for hours, reading, lost in other worlds like Tolkien’s Middle Earth, or Emily Dickinson’s poems, or Stan Lee’s New York City. Reading used to be my default activity, my stave against boredom, and my refuge. I trained as a reader, learning how to read, deeply, through interpretive theories and mechanisms such as Marxism, post-structuralism, close reading, reader response theory, and more.

The tactile thrill of fingers touching words in black ink on pages never went away fully, but at some point in the past 10 years a little black attention-hijacking device called an iPhone came in to my life, with its perfectly designed (in Cupertino, don’cha know) and engineered features doing what it does best, whch is gradually stealing my attention until it fully owns it. The attention thief apparently even steals your attention when it is upside down on a table in front of you (which is what people do in meetings now, to show they are paying attention-watch their hands twitch and get pulled toward it, as if by magic or magnetism).

Mindless scrolling in grocery lines. Picking it up when there is nothing else to do. Pointless Twitter argumentation (the same arguments, over and over, ad nauseum, and ad absurdum). I never reached the point of having a phone by my bed. That always seemed too far- too much.

For me the tipping point, the point of noticing that something was wrong, was noticing this, and this only: