What we lose when we give up reading…

…The very foundations of modern societyThere’s a 15-year-old YouTube video, showing a toddler scrolling and clicking on an iPad. She tries those moves on magazines, and gives up, perhaps concluding that a magazine is a broken iPad.

Which sums up our relationship with print these days. In US, a 2024 study shows daily screen time has risen to 7.5 hours, while time with books and papers has reduced to 25 minutes. Static print doesn’t stimulate us like the internet. It’s boring, and so…primitive? Anything but, if you ask Joel Halldorf , professor at University College Stockholm, whose book Reading Matters is a delightful history of reading and books, and a warning about the dangers of giving them up.

Chapter after chapter, Halldorf shows how the humble book is an extremely sophisticated invention. First off, it took us 65,000 years to get from language to writing. Yes, writing –therefore reading – is only about 5,000 years old.

It’s not one of our “natural” gifts. We learn to read and write with a lot of practice, and become rusty when we stop.Couple of thousand years ago, writing and reading were both extremely rare.

Writing, because things like parchment and papyrus were super expensive. The length of scroll needed for a Bible cost as much as 300kg of wheat, Halldorf says. And you had to pay for a scribe besides. But then you needed a specialist reader too, because all text was written without space and punctuation. Why? Because that’s the way we speak. The problem with this mode of writing was that you had to read it aloud, to concentrate.

Once spaces and punctuation were invented , silent reading became possible, giving rise to erotic and radical political writing.

Early Christians had experimented with the ‘codice’, a kind of book made by cutting scrolls into pages so that both sides could be written on. It was cheaper and portable, and became their identity when pagan Romans and Jews stuck to scrolls. But it wasn’t until paper reached Europe that writing became more common.

As serious books spread, universities came up, and with them disputatious scholars. While monks read books cover to cover, slowly, with devotion, these scholars ‘skimmed’ books for information to forge arguments.

So, they invented chapters, tables of contents and indexes. Next, the printing press standardised size, script and layout, and also page numbers. It also standardised vernacular languages. For example, “Farmers across Britain heard Scripture read in the same dialect” after the first English Bible was approved in 1539.So the book was invented by degrees over thousands of years. And when the press democratised it, it started changing society. Martin Luther’s printed pamphlets brought about the Reformation. Ideas of freedom, abolition of slavery, etc, spread through books. Reading also changed thinking. As Halldorf says, an oral society doesn’t form complex ideas. But writing enables a literal society to reason deeply with clauses and subclauses.

And so, by the 1800s, the West became very bookish. People always had their noses in books. That spell started breaking in the 20th century with cinema, radio and TV, and now our phones have almost brought us full circle. Halldorf warns we’re becoming more oral again, therefore losing the ability for deep reasoning. Need proof? You have WhatsApp university, and social media thuggery and fakes.