26 April

Reading is one of those universally loved things. But does it have a dark side? I think so, in a few ways. 1) Books created the idea that knowledge is separate to human beings who use it. It’s ‘in the literature’. The idea of a library where knowledge is stored, rather than knowledge freely circulating in everyday life. 2) Books helped create the illusion that we are separate to the world around us. Reading fosters what we call introspection, as an act reading promotes an experience that suggests we have an internal world separate to the external world. We lose ourselves in the worlds of texts. It is in some ways a profoundly anti-social act. 3) Following from 1) books also helped create the fiction that the ‘truth’ of things is somehow separate to things themselves. It favours the creation of mysteries, elites and cults, because it takes the locus of meaning outside our shared lives and places it into a separate world of ‘knowledge’. Knowledge becomes a protected space with access rights. 4) Books helped to create the fictional split between mind and body. Look at the picture, reading strongly encourages immobility, our ‘bodies’ tend to slump underneath us as we read. Our ‘minds’ are the things we see as dealing with this apparently separate knowledge to be found in text. The web and social media are reversing all of these trends, making knowledge revolve around people and their lives again rather than the other way around. But a kid who spends their day online is somehow seen to be doing a less healthy thing than a bookworm: kids’ online lives are profoundly social, much more than reading.