On a Sunday full of possibilities, I am colonised by the dementors of too much choice. I unlock my mobile phone, and a dawn of overwhelming choices breaks — movies, music, podcasts, games — it perplexes me. Amidst my indecision, a dust-ridden copy of The Bell Jar falls from the bookshelf. The bile of guilt rises to my throat. But in the end, I find myself afloat in a reassuring puddle of intoxicating cat videos online.
In a hyperconnected world, where everything is at the distance of a click, books are left to age pale yellow. With heads buried in virtual graves, the newer generations often see reading as mundane. Though the benefits of reading are common knowledge, the privilege of choice makes other easily consumable media seem the low-hanging fruit of entertainment. Today, reading rests in a coffin — at the cusp of its funeral. The escalating discontinuance of magazines, publishers and bookstores worldwide is a testament to how rare readers are becoming.
The blast of the digital has reduced everything to short and swallowable — even literature. Gen Z has made literature undergo a metamorphosis, catering to their sinking attention spans. From Instagram poetry to captions to tweets, the reading fabric of Gen Z is brief — and so is its impact. They are reading rapidly and recklessly, and the dangers of little knowledge are not concealed. Long-form reading is now confined to the consumption of information for academic and institutional work. Reading for the sole bliss of the act seems to be archived in the halls of history. We are reverting to times when only an elite ‘reading class’ consumes long-form texts — this is regression as a society. Though digital reading might be a new avenue for words, studies suggest that reading printed text develops better comprehension than reading on a screen.
