The Future

If there is anything that I am thankful for, it's that I am unable to see the future. I know there are some people who wish they could see into the future, but for me, I think this would be a very dire curse. After all, if you knew what was going to happen, wouldn't you be constantly worried about it? And furthermore, wouldn't you be depressed that the future was not now?

When it comes to the future, I don't feel particularly hopeful. I once felt hopeful about the future, which is strange that I no longer do. I feel like the things I was once very excited about are the very things that now make me a no hoper. There are a few of these points. For the sake of this argument, it's the future of readers, writers and publishers that concern me.

It was well documented, even a generation, or two ago, that readers were among us, but few. The notion that so few people read a book was disturbing, for sure. In the olden analog days, already people were reading less. And now, I see people reading all the time, but what they read, debatedly a book or not, is an illuminated screen.

It's something that I still think about, as my serious on reading indicated. What I think about now, is the future. What will be the future of reading?

When the online publishing began, I was very excited. I was equally as excited when I got my Kindle. There was something very abuzz about the whole thing. There were free poems and stories and novels available on the Internet. It was this sudden realization, at least for me, that I would be able to read anything I wanted to read at a moment's desire. It was like my capriciousness was piqued at the slightest pull one direction or another. In short, when all of this began and it was but a fraction of what we have now, I was ready to read and read and read. I once spent a year trying to read a novel a day and I had to walk to the library every day or so in order to do it. Suddenly, I could do the same thing in my bedroom with the use of the Internet and my computer.

Even though I was excited about it, the excitement really began to fade. I found a few things to be true as I wandered through a time of digital reading. First, I started to remember less and less of what I was reading. When I read books, and especially after having read several in a short period of time, I am able to remember phrases, sentences and whole passages verbatim. I noticed that the Kindle did not work like this for me. Sure, I could highlight whole passages and save them, but I could not remember them and indeed, I did not go back to reread the passages I saved. It was the same thing with individual words. When I come across a word I do not know in a book, I am forced to figure it out from the context or look it up in the dictionary. With the Kindle, or even with Internet reading, I can simply highlight the word and my digital medium will define it for me. What I found was this, when I am forced to look up a word, physically in a dictionary, I retain that word. Conversely, when the definition of a word is provided to me, I forget it just as quickly. It's a strange conundrum.

What occurs to me now, about the future of reading, is that those who read, will continue to read. Those casual readers, like vacation readers will continue to do that too. Beach reading is relaxing after all, and a wonderful way to work through a relaxing day. But what about everyone else? I feel like everyone else will continue to not read. They will continue to do what they have always done and that's something else entirely, scanning social media, watching videos, playing video games. And it's okay.

What does concern me about the readers of the future is not how much or how little reading is going on, but the delivery system of the information. I fear that the digital books, no matter which channel we're talking about, will decrease the comprehension of the words therein. I also fear that with the easy transfer of data digitally, there will be more and more books available and with that comes the idea that there will be more and more of the same book available. If we are consuming books at such a rapid rate and at such a superficial level, doesn't it stand to reason that none of them, nothing about about them will stick with us?

I realize that much of this argument arose during the pulp revolution of the early to mid 20^th century. Then there was the idea that the quality of writing would go down. Perhaps it did. I don't think so. There were still only a finite amount of presses, a finite amount of publishing houses. Now there are limitless publishers and an infinite, or seemingly so, amount of data available masquerading as literature. I think there is still literature out there and digital literature not excluded. I just feel like a reader now has to sort through a lot of nonsense to get to something worthwhile. And the future? I predict we'll have to wade through a bunch of bullshit if we want to score.