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Reading Muscle

Interesting essay about the degradation of reading skills among college students. Everyone is impacted by the malaise but the younger you are the longer you will live to suffer from it

Even as a career academic who studies the Quran in Arabic for fun, I have noticed my reading endurance flagging. I once found myself boasting at a faculty meeting that I had read through my entire hourlong train ride without looking at my phone. My colleagues agreed this was a major feat, one they had not achieved recently. Even if I rarely attain that high level of focus, though, I am able to “turn it on” when demanded, for instance to plow through a big novel during a holiday break. That’s because I was able to develop and practice those skills of extended concentration and attentive reading before the intervention of the smartphone. For children who were raised with smartphones, by contrast, that foundation is missing. It is probably no coincidence that the iPhone itself, originally released in 2007, is approaching college age, meaning that professors are increasingly dealing with students who would have become addicted to the dopamine hit of the omnipresent screen long before they were introduced to the more subtle pleasures of the page.

The muscle needed to latch on to and finish reading a big book without getting distracted is one I lost a while back. But I am able to recover it sometimes - specially, if I happen upon something that really grabs my attention or connects me to memories from a time before the internet existed. I am pretty sure I would be no different from the college kids this author writes about if I did not have sufficient mileage pre-internet. That is the only saving grace.

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