The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau duly lamented in 1761 that “the Frenchman reads a lot, but only new books; or to be precise, he leafs through them, not in order to read them but to be able to say that he has read them.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
LOL
Digitization is merely the latest innovation in reading, and we are still coming to terms with the cultural consequences. If skimming seemed necessary at the dawn of the Renaissance, it now feels unavoidable.
Today, digital reading does not complement print so much as replace it. The result is a world in which, to borrow the literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf’s phrase, “skim reading is the new normal.” A growing proportion of people never engage with print, and many admit that they struggle to read deeply at all—even when they really want to. In a study of devotional digital reading among evangelical Christians, conducted by John Dyer of the Dallas Theological Seminary, one participant confessed: “It felt a little more like skimming an email to get it done rather than really studying God’s word.”
The erosion of deep reading weakens our capacity to grasp complex ideas.
I have noticed my reading has been corrupted by the web.