Reading insecurity: harmful effects of the Internet become a study and are compared to books

It seems fiction, but there is still a large part of society that questions the legitimacy of online reading. Not only that, but it puts it in check compared to the books. What seems to slip through the fingers, and like the frayed yellowing pages, it wasn't so long ago that the legitimacy of novels was, in its own time, questioned, insulted, and snubbed.

They were often accused of leading their most ardent enthusiasts into inexcusable mistakes and, for all intents and purposes, capable of ruining them for real-life practicality. Sound familiar?

These expectations, as well as the prejudices in both types of reading, became a study at the university. After all, technology and literature have a lot in common. In his essay on the so-called phenomenon “reading insecurity”, Katy Waldman describes the current climate as an inevitable result of orality.

But it goes beyond that, though. What his study tries is not to condemn internet reading to the detriment of classical reading, but to establish a parallel between the two modalities, as a way of documenting hysteria about the habits of youth.

Reading and the trusted source

Part of the feeling that online reading is inferior to so-called traditional reading is not a concept that exists only because it is a habit of young people. Even if this is the source of some of the prejudices. In this regard, Katy argues that “books and articles investigate the way we read now” and “a long series of studies suggest that people read the Internet differently to the way they read novels.”

Katy goes further and draws parallels to reading in historical context, noting that spoken language has always been portrayed as unreliable, this may be especially true of language spoken by women. Waldman writes:

“I can't help but think that the great debate around 'orality and literacy' – the slippery nature of one versus the stable authority of the other – is back, more or less. This time, we cast the new technology as unreliable and the relic-like printed book as the trusted source.”

Katy Waldman – The Insecurity of Reading.

What ends up encompassing the debate is perhaps the fact that, inevitably, what makes books today enjoy certain status are the same reasons on which they were condemned in their time. Many of them related to their ability to engage and the strong relationship with oral practice and youth.

Madame Bovary ahead of her time

It is worth remembering that not even the novels that marked history managed to escape the rule of condemnation. We cannot forget that, in its time, absolute romance, Madame Bovary (1856) had been condemned among his own. And it went further, as for many, what seemed like a grand celebration of romantic love was nothing more than a sharp criticism.

In his novel, Gustave Flaubert describes a teenage Emma Bovary who “dirty her hands with books borrowed from old libraries”. Everything Emma reads is exciting compared to her life. Before marriage, she was in love; but the happiness that she should have followed that love did not arrive, and she, in turn, felt cheated.

What she did not find in her marriage, Emma tried to discover what is happiness, passion, rapture, which seemed so beautiful to her in books, in so many other places. In the arms of other men. Adultery. Scandal. A novel ahead of its time.

In Emma Bovary's conflict and daydreams, Flaubert is channeling a century of concerns about young women particularly susceptible to the fantasies they find in novels and the seductions of reading.

For Katy Waldman, Madame Bovary's plot is not unreasonable. Since, from the late 19th century to the mid-XNUMXth century, she added, women were considered at risk for not being able to differentiate between fiction and life.

In Madame Bovary, Flaubert may be working out some of his own anxieties, being really torn between this romantic imagination and a kind of realism that would succeed this avant-garde.

Part of Madame Bovary is Flaubert trying to exorcise his own really powerful romantic imagination. And alienation whose side effects are really powerful. By criticizing Emma, ​​he criticizes the whole of a society obsessed with superficiality.

Austen and the hysteria of excesses

Going in reverse comes Jane Austen, who, following Flaubert's example, was another novelist who played with ideas about reading. In Northanger Abbey (1817) Austen tells the story of Catherine Morland, a romance lover whose reading makes her believe that a man she is staying with is a murderer.

Catherine is a typical young woman who cannot distinguish between fact and fiction. But, she doesn't dare criticize her protagonist so fiercely. On the contrary. Austen is something of a master at satirizing excess, but she's also praising the novels' ability to cultivate judgment and taste.

The reading of women, especially teenage girls, had always been associated with the igniting of sexual passions; with radical and liberal ideas; with arrogance; with an attempt to overthrow the status quo. THE Northanger Abbey ridicules the social notion that portrayed women as so stupid that they would not be able to distinguish between reality and fiction.

A parallel that we can draw, for example, with all the prejudice about communities of fanfiction. Who hasn't found themselves criticizing this style of online reading? Or even what we read on social media. While today's fears are different from Austen's times – more focused on what we find on the Internet than how we interpret what we read – there is a similarity after all.

Our contemporary anxieties about reading reflect a distrust that the individual is capable of differentiating good material from bad material or using the information they absorb productively, constructively, and safely.

On the other side of the coin, what was once seen as a risk in the books is now lauded as a force to be reckoned with. Today, many value novels for promoting direction, focus. Which, for some critics of the XNUMXth and XNUMXth century novel, getting lost was precisely the problem.

Of course, it is not at all worrisome the way in which we allow ourselves to be absorbed by some media. A perhaps distant echo of earlier concerns about youth and romance may parallel the current discourse on youth and video games.

But all the imagination that books can be dangerous seems to have fallen by the wayside, which raises the question of what today's new sources of entertainment and information will look like to critics and scholars of the future.

Fifty years from now, we may regret our inability to read online in a satisfyingly efficient way. What will be the stimuli that the future has in store for us? For now, just place bets and, just in case, hitch a ride on nostalgia.

fonte: New York Times