Let Them Read Books, Part II
Picking up from the previous post, here's the second part of my manifesto.
The Rise of the Screen
Apple launched its first iPhone, not coincidental to the death-throes of the book, in 2007. Before the year was out, everyone seemed to have one. I did. In his “iPhone History,” Matthew Jones notes that “six million iPhones had been sold in the product’s first year, with sales stopping only because the company ran out of products.” Once competing devices from Samsung and other companies entered the market, the world had already changed forever. Personal communication, music, romantic relationships, commerce…everything was affected by this miraculous invention, but perhaps no aspect of our society changed, virtually overnight, more than media.
The “gatekeeper” model of print media, once it went social and digital, has more or less died, even as publishing houses still oversee the distribution of literature. No longer do we look to experts, teachers, or journalists to edit and curate what is important, good, or worth our time. Those who do read books crowdsource their taste, relying on BookTok or Goodreads to shape algorithmic to-read lists. But book readers are becoming fewer and farther between.
In its place, the internet has come to dominate the way we think. As Ezra Klein writes in his perceptive New York Times column on Instagram, as the initial dream of the open and democratic internet faded, “online life got faster, quicker, harsher, louder. ‘A little bit of everything all of the time,’ as the comedian Bo Burnham put it. Smartphones brought the internet everywhere, colonizing moments I never imagined I’d fill.” So pervasive is this colonization that one can’t even micturate without being online, lest boredom set in: “Many times I’ve walked into a public bathroom and everyone is simultaneously using a urinal and staring at a screen” (Klein). Walk anywhere in Singapore, from the silent fuselages of MRT cars to the ever-churning escalators in every air-conditioned mall, and most people’s necks are parallel to the floor, staring into a screen, most with noise-canceling headphones on. The real world, it seems, is just too boring to tolerate. We need screens to show us something else; but it’s not a single human hand pulling the levers of your endless feed.
After the advent of the smartphone, the power of curation of any medium at all—whether news, film, television, pop music, even visual art—was put into the hands of machines that are incentivized to monetize your attention. We no longer rely on teachers and thinkers like Gallagher to help us develop taste and judgment. Instead, we get a computer program to suggest “you-might-likes,” and click on the next thing. In an interview with Notre Dame Magazine, linguist Maryanne Wolf describes the “algorithm that is used to increase usage in social media, a seemingly innocuous strategy to increase profit.” In an interview about the concept of attention capitalism, investor Albert Wegner says “We could use [computer] systems to surface the best…content on YouTube, except that YouTube has zero economic incentivization to do that…[their] algorithm would rather show you something that enrages you, because then you’re going to rage click on the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing after that.” Call it what you will—rage-baiting, trolling, clickbaiting—the machine is designed to get users riled up so they keep watching, not to stop and think, not to entertain counterclaims or rhetorical situation—in other words, not to read deeply. Wolf warns that “in the wrong hands,” this algorithmic methodology “is a formula known long and well by demagogues…tell people they are great (over and over) but [that they] have had their greatness stolen by others (over and over) and label all dissenting perspectives as traitorous.” Thoughtless outrage can be easily foisted upon a populace that doesn’t have the time or resources to think their feelings through. As to her historical evidence to support this assertion, she notes drily that “Göring said as much at the Nuremberg Trials” (Temple).
Of course, it’s not just rage that drives us to stay glued to screens. Pleasure is even more addictive. Dr Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, “calls the smartphone the ‘modern-day hypodermic needle’: we turn to it for quick hits, seeking attention, validation and distraction with each swipe, like and tweet” (Waters) Where a newspaper, magazine, or paperback might have once been sufficient to pass the time, with the added benefit of burning the neural pathways that lead to deeper reading skills, we don’t turn to bound printed matter in our down time any more. Instead, our addiction to dopamine, the reward hormone, drives us to regard “every spare second [as] an opportunity to be stimulated, whether by entering the TikTok vortex, scrolling Instagram, swiping through Tinder or bingeing on porn, online gambling and e-shopping.” (Waters) Notably, none of these verbs is remotely akin to reading or even just pausing to reflect. Phones keep us hooked, in part, because we don’t, and don’t want to, think about what we’re doing. We just want to feel rewarded.
And as they flood us with the feeling of free and effortless pleasure, the most powerful social media platforms—Youtube, Instagram, TikTok—make their money in an old-fashioned way: copious advertising. These companies can monetize the attention paid to their content down to the second. Andrew Beattie of Investopedia notes that “YouTube, like most other Google properties, earns the bulk of its revenue through advertisements, which can be targeted to specific users. The model works extraordinarily well—in “just the first three months of 2023, YouTube generated $6.69 billion from advertising” (Beattie). As vividly illustrated in the film The Social Dilemma, Google and its competitors trade on commodities that users believe are free; all you need to do to use Google is open a web browser, and all you need to do to use Instagram is accept the user agreement. But as former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris warns in the film, “If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." As children and teens increasingly participate in systems that share and monetize their behavior data, the more powerful such systems become; to ensure that no users question the “freedom” of social media, these systems suggest that “privacy” is an old-fashioned Boomer concept, while “sharing” and “posting” are the most important things that people can do to meaningfully participate in the world. Schools have had little choice but to sign the Black Book and dance with the devil of technology, even as such technology has already disrupted the meaning of school beyond recognition by those of us who remember the romantic notion of the democratic, free internet of the 1990s.
We can see the direct and dark result of the attention economy all around us now—the most powerful, wealthy, and influential men in the world are Tech Bros, all of whom are pushing on the US and the world a way of thinking that is antithetical to my project and profession as a writer and teacher of literature.
Where we teach reading literature—the art of the written word—because it promotes empathy, “the highest form of critical thinking” according to National Council of Teachers of English Ambassador Lindsay Schneider—the Tech Bro and Startup mindset promotes the opposite. Douglass Rushkoff outlines the tenets of what he calls “The Mindset” shared by the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and others in his book Survival of the Richest: “the reduction of nature and complexity, the domination of others, and the extraction of substance and energy from the real world and its conversion into symbol systems, like money.” Rushkoff suggests that the more wealthy these men become by promoting such a mindset, the more “anti-human, anti-empathic sensibility” they grow. The “culture wars,” in this frame, are not about groups vs. groups or even ideologies vs. ideologies, but about a shockingly simple divide: whether to face the problems in our world head-on and together, or whether to allow the ultra-wealthy flee them, isolating themselves in impermeable bubbles of data, wealth, and power in hopes of escaping the rest of us into a virtual reality of their making, or even, literally, into outer space. Is empathy a “liberal” or “progressive” (or, heaven forbid, “woke”) concept? Do teachers or programs that promote empathy really push an “agenda?”
I never thought I would have to live in a world where the nominal desire and need for understanding the emotional experiences of others could be twisted into a truncheon that the rich and powerful could use to flog their perceived political enemies.
Attention Must Be Paid
At the heart of it, attention capitalism is to blame for the current state of reading skills in our classrooms. There is little a paper book, which takes space, focus, and many hours of practice to read well, can do to compete for attention with such a two-pronged system of outrage and sloth, driven by the few wealthiest men who have ever lived, all of whom gained their wealth in the last 15 years and as a direct result of their war against critical thinking and empathy. The notion that all new technologies are “advancements” to the next stage of human society is at the heart of their Mindset. But the invention of the smartphone is not the same as the invention of agriculture or sanitation or penicillin, nor is it the same as its spiritual predecessor, the printing press. Clearly, as we struggle to disentangle ourselves culturally from the sticky web of colonialism, it becomes evident that the role of literacy (and gatekeeping of access to literacy) has been at least a passive driver of injustice. Print literature is not somehow separate from harmful agendas, implicit or explicit. However, the fundamental operation of the written word remains to change the mind of the reader, as the imagination is the only “place” where words have any meaning. My job as an educator is to show my students that this is true, and to assure them that they have the power to shape their own imaginations through practice and discipline and open-mindedness.
But there are forces at work inside and outside the school system that prize concepts that thwart practice, discipline, and open-mindedness that it takes to read deeply. In the world of attention capitalism, the powerful prize three notions: productivity, efficiency, and growth, with growth being the most recent goal of any profit-making venture. But human beings, as sentient animals, are not designed to be “productive” at all times. The phone and its constant reminders to connect, post, and respond has transformed our consciousness to be always on alert, aware that we may not be as productive as we ought to be. Sooner or later, we begin to tie our value of productivity to the more-is-more ethos of what Jenny Odell calls “the rhetoric of growth” in her instructive and essential book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. “In the context of health and ecology,” Odell points out, “things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way” (25). It’s easy tell from this passage how Odell will connect the values of maintenance and care to both gender and an ecological/indigenous stance she calls “bioregionalism;” both of these frames directly oppose the gendered, Musky-masculinist “Tech Bro” values of globalism and disruption, where what’s new is what has reduced the old to rubble. Think of how many successful startups operated on this kind of rhetoric; Amazon “disrupted” the bookshop, then the shopping mall, and now almost all retail commerce; Facebook and Twitter “disrupted” mainstream media; Uber “disrupted” transportation; Airbnb “disrupted” hotels; the catalogue goes on. In 2025, the narrative of disruption has drifted into education as well, with “changemaking,” “flipping classrooms,” “reimagining,” “emerging technologies,” “paradigm shifting” and other such buzzwords driving initiatives and reframing the purpose of school before the time and space of the classroom can be shaped accordingly. One common “disruptor” has been the drive to move learning into a digital space, with Google and Apple leading the way in educational technology.
But there’s a cost. The illusion that digital media are “free” and “accessible” reinforces a pernicious agenda that is explicitly designed to increase the power and wealth of said media’s owners. You can always close a book and pick up another one. Instagram, on the other hand? Its users tend to treat it like it is a utility like clean tap water or electricity, something essential and necessary for society to function. Utilities, however, are regulated by governments as part of the basic social contract; at the turn of the millennium, when the US government had a chance to regulate the internet and social media, they chose not to regulate, in a “hands-off regulatory environment” dubbed “cyber-libertarianism” (Milano). John Palfrey, Klinsky Lecturer at the Harvard Law School, argues that digital media require immediate regulation in the aftermath of the Twitter-fueled insurrection attempt of January 6, 2020: “We need a regulatory regime today for technology that puts the public interest first, with equity and inclusion as a design principle and not an afterthought” (Milano). Just add “diversity” to those last two ideas, and suddenly it becomes obvious why the Trump administration, under the direction of Elon Musk, is doing away with anything and everything labeled “DEI,” including in schools: to regulate the internet would mean to regulate the unchecked power of four of the top five wealthiest men in the world.
Truly, today is a crisis moment for empathy. Martha Minow, in her closing remarks of Palfrey’s Klinsky lecture, noted that “it’s remarkable to see the Secretary General of the United Nations warn that social media is weaponized now for political gain against refugees, migrants, dehumanizing minorities, and so-called others.” It’s easy to see her prediction from 2021 coming true with each daily news cycle. “Hate is moving into the mainstream,” she noted then, “and with each broken norm, the pillars of our humanity are weakening” (Milano). Should my English classroom remain a reinforcement of the “pillars of our humanity,” I must choose to reject “The Mindset” at every turn by proactively and creatively teaching my students to increase their understanding of other people.
Any alternative should be terrifying to us all.
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