HOUSTON — “The Circle,” Dave Eggers’s runaway best seller, is a futuristic nightmare that seems to have touched a nerve. The Circle is a social networking firm with an Edenic campus and a totalitarian grip on its employees’ lives; it forces them to socialize online at a dizzying pace, constantly messaging, friending, liking and answering surveys. In this novel, 21st-century capitalism has gone far beyond “Metropolis” and “Modern Times.” The digital masters turn even personal lives into hard labor, and so all hours are suddenly working hours. Private space disappears as people make themselves “transparent,” recording and posting their lives for thousands, even millions, of “friends.”
In Eggers’s hellish future world, anyone who’s anyone measures her self-worth through the easily quantified markers supplied by social media networks: How many hits, how many thumbs-up, did you get today? Some of us are already living in this world, at least a good part of the time. Facebook, Google, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram: The digital tsunami is absorbing, distracting and all-consuming — and increasingly it feels like work. Staying up to the minute is a grind, not a pleasure.
The result of the cool-or-not criteria that social networks urge on us is a flattened, analog version of life. We connect with others by cheering for our favorite things, turning ourselves into simple fans and ignoring the many-leveled, ambivalent selves that we actually are. One of the Circle’s disenchanted employees accuses the company of imposing an eternal adolescent immaturity on everyone: “I like stickers and unicorns” expanded to cover the whole human world. But a list of preferences is not a self, even though the Internet tells us to think of things that way.
The digital world offers us many advantages, but if we yield to that world too completely we may lose the privacy we need to develop a self. Activities that require time and careful attention, like serious reading, are at risk; we read less and skim more as the Internet occupies more of our lives. And there’s a link between selfhood and reading slowly, rather than scanning for quick information, as the Web encourages us to do. Recent work in sociology and psychology suggests that reading books, a private experience, is an important aspect of coming to know who we are.
It’s no accident that the click-happy online universe can sap our focus and make it harder for us to read a full-length book with rapt attention. But old-fashioned reading is still essential, because it teaches lessons about human identity that we can’t get anywhere else. Making your way through a long, realist novel means taking a journey with another self; you look into people’s inner lives as you could never do by watching a three-minute iPhone video.
The Circle works as a powerful warning to our culture. True, Eggers can’t seem to create convincing characters, but this seems somehow right for his theme. Two things are missing in his novel: the private self and books. The two absences are linked, since books help us discover ourselves. It’s telling that the library at the Circle is a gorgeous but unused relic: Being alone with a book is something antithetical to the plugged-in networking that preoccupies the company’s workers.
After all the Internet’s many diversions, people still yearn for the solitary refuge of reading, since a book provides a space for reflection, a private therapy that is hard to find online. Most of us remember from childhood the experience of being head-over-heels in a book, utterly absorbed. We entered into a strange, enchanted world and traveled with an author’s characters; we lived their lives with them. There’s nothing in the online world that can fulfill the promise that we get in a work of fiction to give us a sustained picture of the self.
A few months ago, Scott Simon, a host on National Public Radio, tweeted his mother’s last few days of life to his million-plus Twitter followers. Tenderly, tactfully, he shared his shocked realization that his mother was slipping away, and then gone. But I would bet that few of his followers lingered over the tweets for more than a few minutes; they won’t want to reread them next year. Books offer something different, and more.
They give us the time and space we need to pursue a full picture of other people, and by extension ourselves. When we think of Anna Karenina’s death, we remember Tolstoy’s stunning, compassionate effort to give a complete image of her life over hundreds of pages. She is selfishly misguided, self-thwarting to the point of ruin, yet somehow she still has our sympathy. She interests us from first page to last, and each reader feels compelled to ponder why she has such a hold on us.
All of us deserve to be seen fully, in the way that Tolstoy makes us see Anna. When we read about Anna, we see what it might be like to imagine a self. That’s why we reread Tolstoy, and why we read him slowly, drinking in every detail about Anna’s thoughts and her emotions. This is the way to build a self, not through a collection of personal tastes and opinions, the likes and dislikes that the Internet trades in.
We don’t yet live in Eggers’s dystopian Circle, nor will we ever. We know ourselves well enough to realize that we need some time away from the hopped-up, glittering online universe; we need solitude and careful thought and, yes, books to be read slowly and returned to often. These days especially we need to sound the alarm about reading, to practice shutting out distraction so we can have the time and space we need for books.
Young people are the ones in most danger from the electronic environment, but they are also just what they’ve always been, the most fervent and loyal readers on the planet. On the subway the other day, I overheard a boy of 13 or so say to his friends, “The Catcher in the Rye, I’ve read it like 12 times.” And so had I at 13, a good four decades ago. Despite all the dazzle of the digital realm, all the “new thresholds, new anatomies” (to quote the poet Hart Crane), when it comes to reading, not much has changed.
David Mikics is the author, most recently, of “Slow Reading in a Hurried Age.”
from: NY Times
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