The Power of Reading in a Digital Age

I was helping one of my college students with an essay on adaptation when I was struck by the need to discuss an important issue for our time. We live in a world that has become saturated with visual entertainment. Where just a few hundred years ago the best visual entertainment would have been a live stage play or similar performance, modern humans have access to movies, television, video games, YouTube, and a host of other options most of which can be delivered on demand via the internet. As an author, reading teacher, and reader, I can admit to a deep dark fear: will the very act of reading slowly but inevitably become a thing of the past? Is it an outdated form of entertainment surpassed by the abilities of digital technology? I choose to believe that is not the case, and while the fear remains, I have conviction based not just on hope but on evidence and science.

The Mental Effects of Different Media

As the author of the book on adaptation I was helping said student with mentioned, each form of media carries with it a different means of reaching an audience, and no form is entirely superior to the others. Reading or listening to a story is the most basic element. Since there is no visual stimulation, this form demands imagination. The reader or listener must interpret the words and come up with their own internal visualization. There’s no doubt this takes more work from the audience, but as we will discuss later, there is an important payout.

The opposite of this is television and movies. The audience doesn’t have to work at all in this medium. All the imagery is supplied to them. Since we are a highly visual species, this form of entertainment can be very enticing and even addicting. We are entranced by the visual feast, but ultimately there are limitations not just to the medium but to our ultimate satisfaction with it. We are both enthralled and enslaved by such visual delights. The information is limited and confined, and while it may trigger some imagination, it is difficult for us to conjure up anything not already provided. Humans have an innate desire to be active participants, and while passive entertainment can be relaxing in the short term, the sense of fulfillment doesn’t stick with us.

Enter video games, which are the scariest for me to think about in part because I have always been an avid gamer. Until very recently, in my thirties, I was easily able to lose myself for many hours in my favorite games. Video games provide the same visual stimulation as movies, but they are not passive. The gamer is an active participant. There is challenge and expectation. Unlike movies, video games require effort and work from the audience, and this tends to make them more fulfilling over a longer span than movies. I have only recently discovered a sense of unfulfillment with video games. While they are still fun, they don’t trigger the same sense of happiness and contentment as reading a really good book or writing my own stories, and even now I am working to discover precisely why that is and what changed in my mind. This blog is perhaps the first step in that direction. The key negative of video games is that they are ultimately still lacking in the demand for imagination. While you exert control over the experience, you are still limited to what it provides and shows. A player is still on rails, with the freedom of control being largely an illusion. The choices are there, but they are limited by the game’s design, in an often frustrating way.

The Internal Power of Reading

As any good reading teacher will tell you, the best readers are highly visual, able to see the story play out in their mind in a way not so different than watching a movie. Good readers conjure images in their heads to bring the story alive for them. The key difference is that the reader is the active participant here. The writer has provided the reader with a blueprint, but it is the reader’s imagination that brings that blueprint to life. It is highly individual. Unlike a movie where everyone sees the same thing and is thus a slave to the director’s focus and interpretation, a reader creates their own interpretation at every stage. I bet if we could extract the images from five different readers of the same story we would get five different images.

Research on reading shows us that this process is extremely complex, one of the most complex activities our brains can perform. We decode the writer’s message, but it is never entirely complete. Our brains must fill in the gaps using our own memories, knowledge, and connections.

This makes reading a story something that no other medium is able to accomplish. The story becomes ours. We take automatic and even necessary ownership of the story. Yes, the author supplies information and directs our attention, but without the reader and his or her own input, the story is inherently unfinished. There is an automatic demand for collaboration between author and reader. The reader finishes our work for us, and this is a vital part of the process.

I believe this is why the art of true storytelling, be it in written or auditory form, will never die. Even as we advance into the realm of virtual reality and whatever form of stimulation our technology will provide us next, there will never be anything quite like reading. There will never be another medium that is incomplete without us, that demands we take intimate ownership of our experience, and that challenges and refreshes our brains as nothing else can. There is no technological replacement for the feeling you get when you are entirely immersed in a book and everything about the rest of the world falls away and your mind is somewhere else, yet simultaneously within itself and its own construction. Your eyes can't do that for you

That is the power of books. That is the power of reading. I choose to believe that it’s not going away.