“Reading matters”—my two-word summary of the last couple Pastor’s Heart columns. That’s why we have the internet, right? With just a point and a click, you can fill your computer screen with all sorts of stuff to read: news, how-to’s, celebrity gossip, blogs, scholarly essays, and other wiki-info. In fact, some people are so wired, they rarely hold an actual printed book in their hands anymore! Why Britannica when you’ve got Wikipedia?Why Dex when there’s WhitePages.com? Why paper and ink when you can get audiobooks on your iPod and e-books on Kindle?
But some pundits warn, “Not so fast, SuperTechnoMan.” Their argument? Internet reading isn’t the same as traditional reading. Their concern? Efficiency and immediacy—two of the internet’s great strengths—weaken the mental processes necessary to concentrate on complex arguments, long stretches of prose, and book-length story lines. As Nicholas Carr put it in his provocative essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
We’re going to have to wait years for all of the long-term research to come in, but at this point it’s pretty clear that the internet is literally reprogramming the way we think. All of which leads me to this, the refrain I’ve been singing for several Sundays now:Read good books! “Good real books,” I mean. Smell the paper. Flex the binding. Mark the page.
And for those of you who have already skipped to the end, you’ll be able to “read”this column on the pastors’ blog on the new PHBF website sometime in the very near future.