My interest was piqued when I came across a fascinating article by Christine Rosen titled “People of the Screen.” She is not writing about the Bible or Christians. But her analysis of media in this wide ranging piece has may implications.
Her article opens this way:
The book is modernity’s quintessential technology—“a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page,” as the poet Joseph Brodsky put it. But now that the rustle of the book’s turning page competes with the flicker of the screen’s twitching pixel, we must consider the possibility that the book may not be around much longer.
The screen mediates everything from our most private communications to our enjoyment of writing, drama, and games. We are increasingly distractible, impatient, and convenience-obsessed—and the paper book just can’t keep up. Shouldn’t we simply acknowledge that we are becoming people of the screen, not people of the book?
Did you know that one of the ancient names for Christians is “people of the book?” God has spoken to us in the Book He has given. We follow Jesus. We love the Lord our God with all our heart. And we do this by knowing Him through His Word. So, in that sense, we are people of the book. Where will we end up if we quit reading, observing, interpreting, memorizing and meditating on Scripture?
The statistics that Rosen recounts reveal a disturbing trend:
Nearly half of Americans ages 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure; Americans ages 15 to 24 spend only between 7 and 10 minutes per day reading voluntarily; and two thirds of college freshmen read for pleasure for less than an hour per week or not at all.
Rosen offers psychological, sociological and scientific perspectives that, while debatable, give us some helpful concepts to consider:
For centuries, print literacy has been one of the building blocks in the formation of the modern sense of self. By contrast, screen reading, a historically recent arrival, encourages a different kind of self-conception, one based on interaction and dependent on the feedback of others. It rewards participation and performance, not contemplation. It is, to borrow a characterization from sociologist David Riesman, a kind of literacy more comfortable for the “outer-directed” personality who takes his cues from others and constantly reinvents himself than for the “inner-directed” personality whose values are less flexible but also less susceptible to outside pressures.
Screen reading allows you to read in a “strategic, targeted manner,” searching for particular pieces of information, he notes. And although this style of reading is admittedly empowering, Bell cautions, “You are the master, not some dead author. And that is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master”; you should be the student. “Surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns,” he observes.
How strategic and targeted are we when we read on the screen? In a commissioned report published by the British Library in January 2008 researchers found that everyone, teachers and students alike, “exhibits a bouncing/flicking behavior, which sees them searching horizontally rather than vertically….Users are promiscuous, diverse, and volatile.”
This post is getting a little long. Perhaps you are tired of staring at this screen.
Allow me just one more snippet from the article. Consider what this says about reading and a posture of humility:
“I wouldn’t be surprised if, in ten or twenty years, video games are creating fictional universes which are every bit as complex as the world of fiction of Dickens or Dostoevsky,” said Jay Parini, a writer who teaches English at Middlebury College.
The new caveats about “reading” are part of a broader argument that advocates of digital literacy promote: digital literacy, unlike traditional print literacy, they argue, is not “passive.” The screen invites the player of a video game to put himself at the center of the action, and so it must follow that “games are teaching critical thinking skills and a sense of yourself as an agent having to make choices and live with those choices,” says James Paul Gee, one of the chief cheerleaders of video games as learning tools. As Gee told the Times, “You can’t screw up a Dostoevsky book, but you can screw up a game.”
Parini’s and Gee’s statements suffer from a profound misunderstanding of the reading experience and evince an astonishing level of hubris. The reason you can’t “screw up” a Dostoevsky novel is that you must first submit yourself to the process of reading it—which means accepting, at some level, the author’s authority to tell you the story. You enter the author’s world on his terms, and in so doing get away from yourself. Yes, you are powerless to change the narrative or the characters, but you become more open to the experiences of others and, importantly, open to the notion that you are not always in control. In the process, you might even become more attuned to the complexities of family life, the vicissitudes of social institutions, and the lasting truths of human nature. The screen, by contrast, tends in the opposite direction. Instead of a reader, you become a user; instead of submitting to an author, you become the master.
If you are still with me here, maybe you can see how relevant I think these observations are to our Bible reading.
God is the Author. We receive His story.
So please, keep reading your Bible.
I know you will still use the screen. I understand. I know you will still surf the internet. I urge you to do so wisely. When online, guard your heart and redeem the time. I hope you will still read my blog.
But be sure to step away from the screen.
Read the Bible.
The one you can hold in your hands.
The one you can spill coffee on.
Read a Bible that you can underline in.
With a pencil. An actual pencil (not an icon of a pencil and clipboard but an actual pencil that wears down and needs to be sharpened)
Read the Bible.
Feel its weight.
Hear its pages crinkle.