The debate is far from the news agenda, although its influence is decisive in the transformation of the media and in the ability of readers to understand.
And, therefore, in the decision-making of citizens.
How is technology transforming our reading habits?
Are we more or less virtuous readers than decades ago?
The appearance of the book
“The value of attention”
, by the journalist Johann Hari (published a year ago in English with the most suggestive title of
Stolen Focus
) renews the concern.
What does Hari raise in his book?
The loss of our capacity for concentration and deep attention
from the link with certain technology tools.
To demonstrate this, he offers statistics that are always impressive in their magnitude: the proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is at the lowest level ever recorded, and a representative sample of 26,000 people carried out between 2004 and 2017 indicates that the proportion of men who read for pleasure had fallen by 40%, and in women by 29%.
Currently,
more than half of Americans do not read a single book a year
, and in 2017 the average American citizen spent 17 minutes a day reading books, and 5.4 hours on their cell phone.
But the proposal gains in interest with the crossing of ideas and testimonies.
One of them is that of the literacy teacher Anne Mangen, from the University of Stavanger, Norway.
"Reading books trains us in a very specific type of reading, it teaches us to read in a linear way,
focusing on one thing for a sustained period
," she defines.
And she differentiates: “Reading screens accustoms us to reading from nervous jumps that take us from one thing to another.
When we read on screens we quickly scan the information to extract what we need.
What is discovered is that
people understand and remember less what they absorb from screens
, a phenomenon that has been called “screen inferiority”.
And how does this affect the media and their audiences?
Hari writes: “Imagine reading an 85-page newspaper.
In 1986, if you add up all the information that was released about an average human being -TV, radio, reading-
it was equivalent to 40 newspapers of information a day.
In 2007 it had increased
to reach 174 newspapers”.
It is worth asking, how much will that information volume have grown until this 2023?
With these data, the author dares to make a subjective but at least plausible reflection: he affirms that reading news online induces panic, while reading physical newspapers induces perspective.
The nuance is not minor and invites to be thought carefully.
“It is as if we were drinking information from a fire hose:
the flow is excessive.
We are drenched in information”
, he emphasizes.
The statement invites a question: is it a problem of support or volume of production?
Without ignoring the differences between the reading instruments and with the certainty that technology is here to stay, the idea of recovering readers, stimulating their comprehension capacity and contributing to the construction of meaning proposes, above all, moderating the dynamics.
In the media, this translates into looking for deep readers and not fleeting visitors.
As Hari himself defines, perhaps the problem is not so much the technology, but the use we make of it.
