We live in an age of technology. Every day there are new gadgets with better, faster, and smarter software. We are constantly upgrading, downloading and charging. With this culture come a variety of positive developments. We have access to nearly anything in the world in our own pockets, and instantly. Any article, any photo, any song, video-you name it, we can see it instantly. Whether your screen is that of an iPhone 4, a Samsung Galaxy, or an iPad, whatever you need is at the click of a button. This, understandably, has transformed the media and publishing industries. Once confined to physical paper, books, newspapers and magazines have been digitized and are nearly all readily available online. With a few clicks–or rather, depending on the device, taps—books, articles, and images are all readily available, and often for free. A resident of New York can access the Washington Post, or the British Telegraph paper. We are no longer bound by location, nor time. News is instant. Books are instant. Even Snapchat now has a visually appealing news section. Moreover, we have the ability to comment and share opinions on these articles and other writings.
Advertisements can be tailored to our interests. They arrive directly in our inboxes and allow us to purchase merchandise within seconds. We can go to the beach with thousands of books, and pack nothing more than one single device. There is no need to head over to a bookstore, no merit in going outside your house to fetch the newspaper, and no reason to sit by the mailbox to wait for the latest issue of the latest magazine. Right?
Not necessarily. While the readily available instantly gratifying convenience of digital culture is satisfying and transformative, print culture will forever have a monopoly on certain features that cannot be ignored. Of course, there will always be the arguments that appeal to the aesthetic book reading experience, like the smell of a new book or the thrill of turning an actual page. There are also those who point out the sense of accomplishment in reading a book, with a physical indication of how much has already been read. Reading the news on a screen can be droll. We tend to scroll through the words, browsing and scanning them rather than fully digesting them. Because everything is so instantly available, it is often tempting to quickly move on to the next thing, not fully giving attention to the article on the screen. Not to mention the frequent headaches and sleep deprivation that often result from excessive screen-staring. Reading from the physical entity enables book and news lovers alike to delve into a story. Concentration levels are significantly higher in paper readers than digital readers. There is something about words on a page that creates a sense of serenity, allowing the reader to drown out the outside world to focus on the piece at hand.
We retain knowledge through experience and through sensory interaction. Reading from a book allows us to do just that, in a way that Kindle may not. Studies have shown that Kindle readers retain far less information than those that read from a paper book. There is a satisfaction involved with opening the full width of the newspaper to read a story, and there is an emphasis on the “front cover” story more so than the “home page” article. There is also a social aspect involved in borrowing and lending books that simply cannot be replicated by sending a link. Moreover, with the rise of digital reading comes the decline of creative doodling, a powerful tool for memory. Paper pages allow for annotations, preserved forever in your copy of the reading. Tactile advertisements have proven more valuable than electronic ones, since deleting an email is quite simple but a flyer somehow sticks around and never seems to get thrown out until the images are long burned into your mind.
Digital media offers is an aspect of our world that cannot be ignored. The benefits of the online culture are vast and far-reaching. But real tactile reading can never be completely replicated on a screen. So take a break from your phone, tablet, or computer. Do your brain a favor. Print out that next reading, borrow a book from a friend, or sit down with coffee and a real live newspaper. The experience will be worth it.