LeVar Burton Was Not Wrong 🌈📚
May. 25th, 2025 06:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingFam, be careful with your time online.
https://greenjudy.tumblr.com/post/771760180357742592/weird-cultural-shift-detected
If reading longform, offline, makes you feel bored or anxious, be gentle and patient with yourself. Start with stories you remember well, reliable sources of well-being. But please know you will need to put some backbone into it in the long run.
I think we are going to need to rebuild our ability to think, to process experience. This will be an unsupported activity. In fact, most of the really powerful cultural forces are making it very hard for us to notice, feel, perceive, or think clearly.
I should probably reiterate that I’m not an “educator” as much as a “researcher,” and teaching isn’t really my job. Still, I do teach literature classes, and I do take teaching (somewhat) seriously. Because I’m a normal human being instead of an academic cultist, my classes are popular and generally filled with non-Humanities majors. Mostly I teach engineers, scientists, and the future venture capitalists of America (bless their hearts). I don’t think books and stories need to have any sort of “value” beyond simply enriching our human experience, but I often find myself in a position similar to that of a football coach where I have to motivate students to do work whose cost-benefit analysis may not seem straightforward.
I think the post I linked to above gets close to the heart of the matter of why it’s important to continue the study of reading at a college level. It’s not just a matter of developing empathy, critical thinking, and communication skills; it’s also about developing a practice of concentration. For me, as someone with ADHD and dyslexia, reading has always taken effort, and discipline is necessary. I think now, given that the majority of us have grown up with smartphones, everyone’s neurology has been rewired to make this sort of steady concentration more difficult than it needs to be. As someone with experience in how ADHD can absolutely fuck up your life, I can say with confidence that an inability to focus and concentrate – and the related inability to notice, perceive, and think clearly – is not healthy.
In addition, I’ve been reading various studies relating to Long Covid during the past three years, and I’m fairly certain that (a) we all have it to some degree, and (b) it has literally given us brain damage, and (c) social isolation and social media did not help. This is not our fault, and it sucks. The good news is that the damage is not irreversible.
I’m not saying that anyone needs to read, like, Finnegan’s Wake or Gravity’s Rainbow or House of Leaves or some mindfuck stupid shit like that. When I found myself having intense trouble reading back in 2021, I had to start over with idiotic early Stephen King novels. Also, pushing back against the stupidification of everything is not so much about the fetishization of dead-tree books as it is about relearning to be quiet and listen. Audiobooks are a good alternative for people on the ADHD-adjacent shades of the neurology color wheel, and they have the added benefit of being highly compatible with the process of touching grass – which is also a useful way to resist fascism by actively removing yourself from the noise machine.
My post-pandemic experiences in higher education have led me to believe that a lot of us are, in a very real way, at the point of Long Covid where being able to read a book from cover to cover has become a distinct and useful cognitive skill that can almost visibly put you a head above your peers in terms of performance. Literally: reading makes you smarter.
Anyway, I want to shout out to all the writers who are still using their own human minds to create books worth reading. I love you.
https://greenjudy.tumblr.com/post/771760180357742592/weird-cultural-shift-detected
If reading longform, offline, makes you feel bored or anxious, be gentle and patient with yourself. Start with stories you remember well, reliable sources of well-being. But please know you will need to put some backbone into it in the long run.
I think we are going to need to rebuild our ability to think, to process experience. This will be an unsupported activity. In fact, most of the really powerful cultural forces are making it very hard for us to notice, feel, perceive, or think clearly.
I should probably reiterate that I’m not an “educator” as much as a “researcher,” and teaching isn’t really my job. Still, I do teach literature classes, and I do take teaching (somewhat) seriously. Because I’m a normal human being instead of an academic cultist, my classes are popular and generally filled with non-Humanities majors. Mostly I teach engineers, scientists, and the future venture capitalists of America (bless their hearts). I don’t think books and stories need to have any sort of “value” beyond simply enriching our human experience, but I often find myself in a position similar to that of a football coach where I have to motivate students to do work whose cost-benefit analysis may not seem straightforward.
I think the post I linked to above gets close to the heart of the matter of why it’s important to continue the study of reading at a college level. It’s not just a matter of developing empathy, critical thinking, and communication skills; it’s also about developing a practice of concentration. For me, as someone with ADHD and dyslexia, reading has always taken effort, and discipline is necessary. I think now, given that the majority of us have grown up with smartphones, everyone’s neurology has been rewired to make this sort of steady concentration more difficult than it needs to be. As someone with experience in how ADHD can absolutely fuck up your life, I can say with confidence that an inability to focus and concentrate – and the related inability to notice, perceive, and think clearly – is not healthy.
In addition, I’ve been reading various studies relating to Long Covid during the past three years, and I’m fairly certain that (a) we all have it to some degree, and (b) it has literally given us brain damage, and (c) social isolation and social media did not help. This is not our fault, and it sucks. The good news is that the damage is not irreversible.
I’m not saying that anyone needs to read, like, Finnegan’s Wake or Gravity’s Rainbow or House of Leaves or some mindfuck stupid shit like that. When I found myself having intense trouble reading back in 2021, I had to start over with idiotic early Stephen King novels. Also, pushing back against the stupidification of everything is not so much about the fetishization of dead-tree books as it is about relearning to be quiet and listen. Audiobooks are a good alternative for people on the ADHD-adjacent shades of the neurology color wheel, and they have the added benefit of being highly compatible with the process of touching grass – which is also a useful way to resist fascism by actively removing yourself from the noise machine.
My post-pandemic experiences in higher education have led me to believe that a lot of us are, in a very real way, at the point of Long Covid where being able to read a book from cover to cover has become a distinct and useful cognitive skill that can almost visibly put you a head above your peers in terms of performance. Literally: reading makes you smarter.
Anyway, I want to shout out to all the writers who are still using their own human minds to create books worth reading. I love you.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-25 11:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-25 12:59 pm (UTC)And thank you for acknowledging that being online can be difficult, even when you're not actively on social media. I think it's partially a subtle trauma response, and it's partially enshittified web design, and it's partially an effect of all the gunpowder in the air. But also, for me, there are bonus dangers, one of which is the surprise gut punch of encountering someone who managed to thrive during Covid and is now successful in their field (whereas I am not). Like, I recently used Issuu to read an advance review copy of George Takei's graphic novel autobiography, It Rhymes With Takei, and his trademark assertion that "it will be okay" made me want to commit murders. It's not that I hate people who manage to find happiness; but rather, the undifferentiated chaos of the internet can be difficult to process emotionally. I probably wouldn't have had such a strong negative response to the book if I were reading a paper copy, you know?
In any case, thanks for being here on Dreamwidth. Despite everything. And definitely, good luck to us all.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-26 01:26 pm (UTC)"Gunpowder in the air" is a good description of the environment, unfortunately. Dreamwidth isn't exempt, but I still find it a lot easier to manage here. I think maybe a bit part of it is that it's okay/part of the culture to step away and come back/reply later when you're up for it, and also easier not to see what you don't want to with no "Suggested for you" additions shoved into your face. So I take a lot of breaks ;)
Thanks A LOT for the unexpected kind words, and thank you for sharing your thoughts and insights on what you see happening from your perspective, too! You always give me a lot to chew on.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-25 06:13 pm (UTC)I don't have anything profound to add - mostly just nodding along in solidarity bc yes yes yes - but I needed you to know that I busted out laughing at "or House of Leaves or some mindfuck stupid shit like that". I have a friend who mentioned doing a book club with House of Leaves recently and I had to bite my fist instead of... you know, ranting about some mindfuck stupid shit. Thank you for the laugh!
no subject
Date: 2025-05-29 09:34 pm (UTC)(This is one reason I never really vibed with using my phone or tablet as an e-reader. My Kobo *can't* throw notifications or noises at me. There is only book. I'm not saying that this is superior to any other way of reading; I still love dead tree books though for me personally audiobooks are usually a circle of hell, I can't pay attention to sound the same way. But we all have the one that works best for us.)