Bacon once said that reading is mainly a pastime. Ladies and gentlemen in the English countryside written by Jane Austen tend to read in idle and boring afternoons. It was an era full of leisure and vegetation, and the steel footsteps of industrialization have not crushed the idyllic dream of leisure in the past. In the days without photoelectricity, what fun can there be without reading?
From the perspective of popular culture, most ordinary people in China used to study for recreation. In the 1980s, known as the "cultural craze", people were most impressed by the crowded Xinhua Bookstore and various book stands. In that era of relative scarcity and relative leisure, reading is a spiritual pastime. Of course, there is a special background for the nationwide reading craze in this period, that is, China people have just experienced a period of cultural poverty, and most people eat alive in order to get back their books. It is said that difficult philosophical works such as Heidegger's Being and Time will cause panic buying. But this enthusiasm is not exclusive to reading, but a desire for the richness of spiritual life, and then the TV series represented by desire seized people's after-dinner time in a new form.
Therefore, the so-called reading crisis in the information age is somewhat exaggerated, but new cultural forms and pastimes have replaced traditional reading. Generally speaking, people's spiritual life is richer rather than poorer, and it is more convenient rather than more closed to acquire knowledge. Whether the contents of books must be presented in paper form or can be carried and expressed by various means does not require this fundamentalism, but the key is to have diversified choices. We should have an open mind about this. 100 years ago, Nietzsche was also worried about the appearance of newspapers, thinking that this rapidly deteriorating consumable would interfere with people's interest in reading classics. Later facts proved his concern.
This does not mean that the reading crisis does not exist, but needs to be expressed more clearly. When we say we don't study, we often mean that we don't have time and mood to study, not that we don't have books to read. Behind this is a kind of time anxiety. When we say that a person is "bookish", we actually mean "quiet and focused", which takes time to cultivate, and reading is not the only form. Chyi Chin's calligraphy and painting all have this function. After the mid-1990s, China society gradually entered the era of accelerated running, and time became a scarce resource. Especially in the network age where information and time are fragmented, people with "quiet and dedicated" temperament are as scarce as giant pandas, and people keep switching quickly and behave like some kind of anxious patients.
Therefore, the essence of the reading crisis is that people are trapped in a state of mental hypoxia surrounded by a lot of information garbage because they lack the spirit of deep breathing to concentrate on reading. Just five minutes after reading the e-book, I was attracted by the news link that popped up; One minute I was angry about a public affair, and the next minute I might laugh at a joke. According to this trend, the mental structure of human beings will change in the future, and it will become like a goldfish with only 7 seconds of memory. At the same time, due to the lack of in-depth inner experience, people's spiritual temperament began to converge in the network age. If in the traditional reading mode, a thousand people have a thousand Hamlets in their hearts, then in the online reading mode, there is only one way for a thousand people to tell a joke.
Slow down reading, not only in the name of reading, but also from the perspective of protecting and improving the soul and humanistic crisis. If social development is a good horse, reading and the humanistic spirit it represents should be the reins to control it, and it should not be allowed to slip away in our hands.