On Reading in an Age of Distraction
By Gerry Straker, 16 May 2020
During the lockdown, we’ve been encouraging ourselves to read, if you'd like, remind yourself why in these articles:
Today we’re thinking about how to read in age of distraction.
Incredibly, the average person checks their smart phone about 81,500 a year, or once every 4.3 minutes of your waking life![1] Truth be told, we want to be distracted. This has always been the case. Before the internet, it was videos, before videos, television, before the television it was the radio. Before the radio it was the newspapers. Charles Spurgeon said: ‘Newspapers are the Bibles of worldlings. How diligently they read them! Here they find their law and profits, their judges and chronicles, their epistles and revelations.’ We have always filled our lives with things other than the Word, prayer and other than reading good books.
The 17th century French polymath (person of wide learning) Blaize Pascal put it like this: ‘I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.’ Tony Reinke comments: ‘staring at the ceilings of our quiet bedrooms, with only our thoughts about ourselves, reality and God is unbearable.’ [2] And so we fill our lives with distractions. Reinke quotes Peter Kreeft: ‘We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.[3]
The internet fills the holes for many of us. As we’ve said the internet is a gift from God but like all gifts from God (wine, singing, sport) it can be abused. The problem is not technology. It’s our very own operating system, or in the Bible’s terminology: our hearts, and the problems that a new technology brings with it are not new problems.
The internet provides an almost endless hunting ground for those seeking distraction, those uncomfortable with silence, those uncomfortable with resting in God, those unrepentant, those giving into temptation to seek fulfilment anywhere other than God.
But it’s worth thinking about how using the internet is shaping not just what we think (the content) but also how we think. In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr writes: ‘Media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it; in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a Scuba Diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.[4]
Do you ever find yourself:
- Not finishing articles online?
- Clicking from one thing to another through hyperlinks?
- Flitting from one thing to the next?
And do you find it harder to read a chapter of a book than it used to be?
We skim, we scroll, we click. And this hinders thinking in a straight line. We don’t read the complete argument. We don’t dwell and engage our minds with what we flit around on. This is Carr’s basic argument: it’s not just the content of the internet but the way we use it (and are encouraged to use it) which is shaping us. The neural pathways are formed by how we engage with the technology. We are training our brains to think in certain ways.
We are losing the ability to think as we used to. Can you see it in yourself? As Carr warns: ‘A popular medium molds what we see and how we see it – and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are as individuals and as a society. Media work their magic, or their mischief on the nervous system itself…the content of the medium is just ‘the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’… is so much our servant that it would seem churlish to notice that it is also our master.’[5] It’s a tool that is also changing how we think. Carr gives the examples of the map and the clock changing how we think about places and about time, and changing how we live.
In the face of the internet, a playground for distraction, we need to make some decisions about how we use our time, and how we train our brain. We need to decide to read. Eric Schmidt says this: ‘I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something. And I worry that we’re losing that.’ Who’s Eric Schmidt? Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Google - perhaps we should take note!
The internet is a gift. But like all gifts it can dominate our lives in an unhealthy fashion, and change how we live and think. Think how screens are everywhere in our lives:
- What’s the first thing you do in the morning?
- What’s the last thing you do at night?
- Do you ever have FOMO (fear of missing out) because you're not online?
If you want to change, you’re going to make some decisions about how you’re going to spend your time. To be more deliberate about what you do with the time God has given you. To choose what is worth spending time on.
A W Tozer wrote this: ‘The major cause of the decline in the quality of current Christian literature is not intellectual but spiritual. To enjoy a great spiritual book requires a degree of consecration to God and detachment from the world that few modern Christians have.’ [6] He wrote that in 1956, how about 2020?
This is a battle, and as Reinke puts it: ‘our battle against the encumbering distractions of this world - especially the unnecessary distractions of our phones – is a heart war we can wage only if our affections are locked firmly on the glory of Christ.’[7] Again: ‘Let’s be honest: our digital addictions (if we can call them that) are welcomed addictions. The key is to move from being distracted on purpose to being less and less distracted with an eternal purpose.’[8]
Christians, we’re in a war, and one of the ways the devil wages war on us is to persuade us we’re not in a war!
In another of his excellent books Lit! (have I mentioned this book to you before?) Reinke says this: ‘Idols of entertainment and pleasure make the discipline of book reading a battle with our flesh. We’d rather avoid discipline and be occupied with easier tasks like e-mail, Internet browsing, and movies. We neglect books because our hearts reject the discipline to read them. And that is a spiritual problem, a lack of personal discipline, not a lack of times…If we don’t kill the idols of laziness and self-indulgence, these idols will kill our literacy.’[9]
It’s not so much lack of time, as lack of desire. I remember Rico Tice (who presents Christianity Explored) once saying in a sermon, I think it was at chapel when I was at Oak Hill: ‘you always make time for what you want to do.’ C S Lewis wrote this: ‘The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.’[10] That statement works for a lot of life, and not least reading book - there is never a good time to read - there are always other things we could be doing. We have to decide to do what is worthwhile.
Will you join me in a battle to redeem the time? Because this is a battle I am facing too, a battle:
- To work when we’re supposed to be working.
- To rest when we’re supposed to be resting.
- And to deliberately choose reading over checking and scrolling.
Soli Deo Gloria
For the glory of God alone.
[1] Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2017), 41.
[2] Reinke, 12 Ways, 45.
[3] Reinke, 12 Ways, 45-46.
[4] Nicholas Carr, The Shallows, 6-7
[5] Carr, The Shallows, 3-4.
[6] A W Tozer, in Sanders, A Love of Reading, 14.
[7] Reinke, 12 Ways, 50.
[8] Reinke, 12 Ways, 52.
[9] Tony Reinke, Lit!, (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway, 2011), 131.
[10] Reinke, Lit!, 132.