Reading is good for us. Studies1 show just thirty minutes reading per day to be as healthy as laughing with friends, or a yoga session. It lowers blood pressure and heart rate. It de-stresses us. Book reading makes us slow down, think about things, and consider how we and other people feel and how we view the world. It expands our capacity for abstract reasoning, enabling us to pose – and answer – the difficult questions. Habitual reading generates successive new insights and empowers our creativity and imagination2. Reading a book brings us on reflective, relaxing, mini-breaks into other worlds, far away from our world with its ubiquitous screens and devices.
Those technological devices can have the opposite effect on us than reading, causing stress and anxiety. Our always-on internet-connected smartphones, with their multitude of attention-demanding apps are - sadly - changing us in detrimental ways. So called “social” media virtualises peoples’ relationships and sculpts human communication and behaviours to its own designs. The apps are designed purposefully to constantly grab our attention and addict us into using them more3. They turn us into consumers of information - streams, podcasts, videos, memes, and “shorts”. We becoming glued to social media streams designed to draw us addictively into spaces that shorten our attention span, looking for the next information hit. They become spaces where malign actors can fed us “disinformation”, and amplify our negative feelings. Our swipe-and-click culture is conditioning us too into a mode of thought that is shallow, demanding quick evaluation and rapid dismissal. And with the advent of AI systems, we are outsourcing even more of our thinking to the machine, impeding use of our own critical thinking faculties. This is just the opposite of what deep literacy reading does for us.
Studies indicate that our style of reading has become changed - rather than reading linearly anymore (as we do with stories and books) we have become accustomed now to reading in a skimming “Z-pattern” fashion, due to all the information simultaneously presented on our screens. We have started taking that mode of scanning with us into the way we approach and read physical books too4. Nearly two thirds of us no longer read a book in a year. Our preference for using devices over spending time with a book shows that we are developing attention deficit problems (and, in part, due to our use of these devices).
The smartphone is a tool you have in your pocket that is the most powerful, the most transformative, and potentially the most hazardous, ever put into the hands of people. It literally opens up the world to you, wherever you are. But as we all know, it is not without its dangers. Nearly everyone you know now has a smartphone and social media access, yet increasingly less of us read books. We need to take care of which technologies we absorb, and how, because over time our consciousness will come to resemble those technologies.
It is time to reclaim technology for our benefit. What if we were to use that tool in a healthy way instead, as means to access the time-honoured benefits of reading, of deep literacy, of a stress-relieving (not stress-inducing) habit?
Here at Wordfyle we are doing what we can to bring back healthy reading, in easy bites. We provide readers (and writers) with a platform that:
• Allows you to read in a dedicated app - just the text page - without distractions
• Short reads, suitable for on-screen reading (no doorstop novels!), easily completed on a device.
• Read on the go, where and when you can, to fit it in with your daily lifestyle – commuting, in the waiting room, when eating lunch. Ideal for a mobile device.
• Regular suggested interesting reading, just for you, to help engage a regular 30-minute daily reading habit.
• Disabling comments on all our reads, not to be led or bound by the comments of others, but to encourage you to think about the meaning yourself and what a story means to you.
• Reading matter from several genres, places, and times – an expanse of literary experience and diversity.
Reading is a time-honoured way of connecting with others and ourselves. Writing was a way of recording for posterity the truths of the ages and imparting wisdom down the generations. Consider the warnings of acquisition and greed in Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need? or the simple heart-rending portrayal of desire and loss in Joyce’s Eveline. All in your pocket. Using Wordfyle, you can re-connect with reading and develop a healthy technology habit today, and discover once again … the sheer simple joy of words and imagination.
Join us as we launch, and let others know too, of our journey to restore a healthy reading habit … one story at a time.
References:
[2] The Erosion of Deep Literacy, Adam Garfinkle.
[3] Hooked, Nir Eyal.
[4] Stolen Focus: The Surprising Reason You Can't Pay Attention, Johann Hari