The World Beyond Your Head

Efforts to personalise all the settings on our lives make us lonelier and more narcissistic than ever — but reading can help.

In the mid-nineties, Jonathan Franzen gave away his television. His TV set — a massive box from “an era when TV sets were trying, however feebly, to pass as furniture” — had already been relegated to the floor of his closet, where it could only be watched while squatting on the floor and holding the antenna. This was still not enough to prevent him from squandering time watching TV instead of reading books, so he got rid of the television.¹

This story of distraction is how Franzen begins an essay called “The Reader in Exile” (from his 2002 collection, How to Be Alone). In the essay, he worries about the encroachment of digital technology on the private space of reading. It’s quite a thing reading this from my vantage point in a definitively digital culture, almost three decades beyond Franzen’s place at the tipping point from an analogue world to the world wide web we’re all caught in. Reading his essay today was perversely satisfying and yet numbingly melancholic, like I know better than him but I wish I didn’t. It felt a lot like betting against myself and winning.²

Mostly, I felt sudden and surprising self-consciousness. I recognised myself in Franzen’s description of the “self-definition” he gets “from regular immersion in literature”. Readers understand themselves through the obsession of Quixote and addiction of de Quincey, the self-determination of Elizabeth Bennet, or the resistance to arbitrary authority as shown by Captain Yossarian, just as cinephiles find and define themselves through Casablanca’s Rick Blaine, or the vagaries of memory in Eternal Sunshine, or how we interact with time in Arrival. No doubt this can be extrapolated to other arts and their aficionados.

One of the ways in which we refine the self we’re saddled with is by contrasting it against others we encounter in the world. We define ourselves in the negative, against those selves we are not and do not wish to be, and positively in comparison to others we aspire to be like. The first time I read Christopher Hitchens on the courage of the contrarian, I recognised a self I hoped to one day fully embody. When I watched Midnight in Paris, I recognised, in the gullibly nostalgia-infatuated main character, the person I often am. When I consider collaborators with evil or mere perpetuators of the banal, I see selves I hope never to become. It takes a community to make an individual, and many books to make a reader.

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The Daily Me

Although reading is a solitary act, it offers creative access to the inner lives of others, to other ways of seeing and being in the world. Reading challenges our personal dogmas and presents ideas that can refine our thinking or, in many cases, completely overturn our beliefs. Good books — and good reading — are not about reinforcing one’s predetermined and preferred sense of self, which is ego, but about the careful, considered creation of new selves. Although we read alone, we’re invited into an intimacy (of a kind that’s never been truly replicated in the online world) with the text and with the author. Through this relationship with another, we grow as individuals.

This is why I felt a kind of revulsion when I read, in Franzen’s essay, about an essay from the early nineties by the writer Robert Coover. In it, Coover eagerly anticipated the end of the traditional novel’s “elitism” at the murderous hands of hypertext. He hoped that the “networks of alternate routes” in the “nonsequential space made possible by the computer” would defeat “the predetermined one-way route” of traditional writing. The aim was to kick the feet out from under certain hierarchies with the anarchic glee of the postmodernist. This, Coover believed, would liberate the reader from “domination by the author”.³

It’s not tyranny that the author imposes by expressing a view of things or describing a portion of the world previously unknown to the reader. It’s a form of freedom. The author opens the world to the reader, says, “Look, there’s much more than what you’ve seen or are capable of seeing in your finite condition.” The alternative of catering to the reader’s whims and reinforcing his current worldview doesn’t open doors through which the reader can travel and discover new spaces — it merely lends fresh wallpaper to the room he’s always inhabited.

Thankfully, hypertext hasn’t been the killing blow to the perennially dying novel. But there are other challenges to reading, and some of them were foreseeable to Franzen in the nineties. He writes that a future “digital human being” will be increasingly narcissistic as a result of the invitation by new technologies to curate their digital world. He quotes the founder of the Media Lab at M.I.T. writing that one day soon, “newspapers will be printed in an edition of one... Call it The Daily Me.”

When I read this, I remembered how it was when I owned a smartphone. (Yes, I’ve become one of those people who’s gone back to a usefully functionless “dumbphone”.) I thought of the Guardian app on my phone, and how I unthinkingly added to its home-screen only the categories of media I was interested in. Every day I consulted the app and every day I learned about only what I thought I should know, from a source that narrowed those topics further still with the particular left-wing lens they processed news through.

It’s not only the Guardian that allows us to create our own filter bubbles in which to breathe the recycled air of familiar ideas and demographic-based clichés. YouTube, X, Facebook, all social media really, the people we connect with through dating apps and meet-up sites, and the cookies that tailor ads to appeal specifically to you, singular you, centre-of-the-cosmos-you: all of these reinforce the notion that there is no objective world, only infinite, subjective worlds created and populated by unattached individuals.

I can think of nothing lonelier than living in a world of my own creation with only myself for company, occasionally glimpsing other lives in other worlds, but only insofar as they reinforce my solipsistic chamber. The self-recognition that comes of finding out who you are through reading is so different to the self-affirmation that modern consumer life tells us to enjoy: what we get from reading widely, from outside our own scopes of experience, is a prerequisite for growth, which never comes from curating sources that keep telling me I should stay exactly as I am.

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What To Do With the Genie

The self-recognition I found in reading Franzen’s essay ought to warn me against repeating the inevitably doomed project of trying to avert social change that’s probably already happened and is simply waiting to be fully acknowledged. Yet I can’t help adopting the role of Cassandra even while knowing what that role is. Perhaps the protest, albeit without hope of success, is a form of anaesthetic against the pain of change.

Or maybe it’s not so much about putting the genie back in the bottle as it is about being wiser in what we wish for once he’s out. We have the technologies we have and are almost certain never to let them go, but we can still determine what we use them for. I’ve worried in writing about the loss of non-digital reading, and I’ve done so in a digital medium, one that has allowed me to reach readers in a variety of places I would not have been able to reach without my website. Maybe I’ve even convinced some small number of them to put aside the digital world a little more often and to engage with the analogue world — with physical books and tangible reality and people in face-to-face encounters — a little more deeply. There’s nothing wrong with a little irony.

The philosopher G. A. Cohen once described himself as a “small-c” conservative because of his interest in “slowing down the rate of change and ... conserving what is valuable”. Many of us who care to preserve the deep value of reading, of literary culture, and of a shared, analogue world don’t wish to prevent change (nor do we believe this even possible) but wish only to carry this value into the world ahead. We think it’s worth periodically reminding ourselves to slow down, to lift our eyes from the screen, to step out into the world that we share with so many others and that is always waiting for us.

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1. This was a time when to be without a TV was to be without video in the home; there was no Netflix on your laptop, no YouTube on your phone, no live TV on an iPad. Today, this is enviably quaint: if he was distracted then by that huge box, he’d be as defenceless as the rest of us when it got small enough to slip into a pocket and carry everywhere, at all times.

2. I admit to unearned smugness at having the hindsight to see how poorly certain comments would age, sentences such as: “... it’s difficult to tell if the Internet is legitimately big news.” I tried not to scoff at a comparison between predictions about the impact of the internet and predictions in the fifties about atomic energy reducing the cost of monthly bills to “pennies” — as if I, in 1995, would have known any better. There was also a sense of inevitable defeat, of historical determinism, in recognising Franzen’s concerns about a decreasingly literary culture and knowing that the situation has not improved over the subsequent quarter century.

3. This belief that limitations are antithetical to freedom comes out of the naive, unworldly belief that total unrestriction is true freedom. Absolute freedom, especially as manifested in the modern capitalist ideal of endless choice (what colour of phone to buy, which brand of sock to wear, whether to own music digitally, or on CD, or on vinyl, or don’t own it at all but stream it, but which site will you stream it from...?), is a tyranny that enslaves us in a never-ending and exhausting chain of meaningless decisions. I’ve heard it said that irony is the song of the bird who has come to love its cage; the same could be said of consumer choices.