Reading and Observing in a World Full of Words

The modern media ecosystem is inundated with words. Not all of them, though, are worth reading.

“So much of my time online is just nothing,” my friend told me on the phone last week. I was sitting in my car as we spoke for the first time since last summer.

“Yeah…it’s like we feel useless if we’re not online,” I said.

After we hung up, I went to watch the Oklahoma City Thunder tragically lose Game 6 to the Denver Nuggets at a friend’s house. Whatever self-reflection our conversation produced got at least partially swallowed up in my post-game malaise. If the devil can’t get you to sin, he’ll distract you with the NBA.

This morning, though, I woke up earlier than usual, and although I initially fell victim to phone and its cacophony of reels, emails, Substack notes, and text messages, soon found my way to the kitchen table where I read three articles from a physical newspaper called County Highway, edited by David Samuels and Walter Kirn. The newspaper is comprised of off-the-beaten-path stories from around the country and is released six times a year. The paper is unique, of course, in that it enthrones the tangible page to the online pixel, but also because it features genuinely good writing—the stuff you probably can’t get through any other site in the country right now.

To read even a paragraph all the way through without an online excursion, however brief, feels like a miracle these days. Back when I was an undergrad at Wheaton College (IL), my philosophy professor told our class that one of his TAs, a bright and promising young scholar, admitted that he couldn’t read for more than three or four minutes at a time without checking his phone. I related then and can certainly relate now. If online dependence was a struggle before the 2020 pandemic, today it really is starting to feel like the concrete world of trees, sidewalks, skies, birds, various smells, and other people is secondary to the virtual one we’ve manufactured. We take walks, if we ever do, to take momentary breaks from the digital matrix.

So, to sit at my little kitchen table with a mug of coffee and read from a delightful literary newspaper felt, in the aftermath anyway, like a tremendous step forward. One of the essays, written soon after the inauguration of Donald Trump, amounted to a plea for observation without necessarily imposing judgment. The author, Heather Heyes, writes,

Allow the happenings to wash over us — or to wash over someone else, even. Certainly we don’t need to proclaim. Often we need not form an opinion.

Her essay reminded me of my conversation with my friend. I had told him how I was struggling, per usual, with excessive screen time, how I was tired of the struggle, how I wanted to break free and live my life in the “real world.” So much of our draw to the internet, though, is tangled up with Heyes’ acute diagnosis. The internet is filled with images and videos, yes, but it’s also inundated with language. Not just any language, however. This is language on steroids. It’s a lingual avalanche, with hundreds of thousands of captions, blurbs, subtitles, think pieces, and informational tidbits falling down on you at once. And so much of what we encounter on the internet (here on Substack, too) is commentary, interpretation, and judgment. It wants you to think and feel a certain way. And to be clear, there is absolutely a vital place for this type of work. I do it myself and am paradoxically doing it now with you! I worry, though, that if this kind of media becomes our main mental diet, we may no longer be able to directly encounter the world around us—or appreciate the good words on a physical page before us. Today, everything has to be mediated. Every social event has to endure the media gauntlet. Nature is either bohemian or Darwinian, beautiful or brutal. It can never simply present itself to you as it really is. The world through the lens of modern media is malleable; it’s Kantian to the core. We make of it what we will.

My experience reading County Highway, though, was different than the typical online skim. I sat down and read for an extended period of time, but the words on the page weren’t distortional. They didn’t put me in a mental funk. Instead, the morning sunlight on the counter was clarified. The silence acquired a deeper resonance. The smell of the ink and the paper and steaming coffee all rose up to meet me. I felt a sense of genuine joy and contentment. This isn’t merely a plug for an excellent publication. (Although, would I be upset if Walter Kirn read this and took me under his literary wing? To the contrary!) My morning glory may hint towards the good kind of reading, towards a rare species of attention that our over-saturated media ecosystem actively tries to destroy. The astute media and culture writer L.M. Sacasas summed it up beautifully in a recent Substack note:

Post-literacy finally arrives not through the disappearance of text but by its extreme proliferation.

Post-literacy is an over-saturation event.

Post-literacy does not entail a return to orality.

I can’t imagine a better way to think about our current media jungle. It’s oversaturated. There’s simply too much, it’s overwhelming, and the language we encounter often obscures more than it illuminates. Moments in silence with a newspaper and letting its words wash over me, though, makes me want to let the world, and the events of my life, do the same thing. I’d like to taste coffee, enjoy a good book, and feel sunshine on my face instead of always consulting the gurus and commentators on what kind of coffee is best, or what kind of books I should read, or whether I might consider a sauna instead of the sun. Maybe, then, a direct encounter with the wholly Other, with the hauntingly Real, is the best education we can hope for.

The Oklahoma City Thunder, by the way, ended up winning the series in Game 7. I was ecstatic.

Photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash