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The concern came from a long-time Free Press reader during my presentation to the Carleton Breakfast Club.
She understood the importance of everything our newsroom produces. But she worried she didn’t have enough time to read all of it.
And if she couldn’t find time to do so, how were we ever going to attract readers in an age of endless digital distractions?
I reminded her that subscribing to the Free Press doesn’t require you to pass a test on what you’ve read before you can go on to the next edition. Read as little or as much as you want on whatever platform you prefer: print, desktop, phone or tablet. And please remember you don’t need to confine your reading to one sitting.
But the question of finding time to read fact-based journalism stuck with me over the Thanksgiving weekend because those of us in the text business can’t ignore the impact of what is increasingly a scrolling society.
Reading requires effort. And stamina. How can that compete with the ease of vertical video?
London Times columnist James Marriott worries that it can’t, leading to the dawn of a post-literate society that has huge implications for democracy.
I’ve long wondered whether declining newspaper subscriptions might contribute to a decline in civic engagement. And Marriott, the author of The New Dark Ages, argues that the shift from print to screens helps explain the growing chaos, tribalism and rage we are seeing today.
To put it simply, the pages of the Free Press don’t scream at you. But screaming is all the rage on the screens fracking every ounce of our attention.
“The raucousness of a TikTok feed — you’re back in this emotional world where all information is mediated via a human being, but it has refilled our world with feelings and passions and anger and rage,” he said on a New York Times podcast last week.
“And I think it’s also one of the roots of this more tribal feeling that our world has now. And I think although that literate world was, in many ways, kind of weird in its emotional desaturation, that emotional desaturation was very useful for democratic politics.
“It relies on people being able to have not perfectly rational arguments, but arguments that are informed more by logic, reason and evidence than by the kinds of forms of emotional persuasion that come more naturally when you can persuade someone … not with evidence or with an argument, but by charming them around to your point of view, crying at them or shouting at them.”
The power of emotional persuasion over rational argument is worth considering as Alberta prepares for Monday’s referendum, which our Melissa Martin is covering on the ground.
But even after the ballots are counted, will logic, reason and evidence prevail? The lessons of the Freedom Convoy and the COVID-19 pandemic suggest just how difficult it may be to turn the tide.
So what can be done — especially when we add the slop of artificial intelligence?
I wish I had told that long-time reader at the Carleton Breakfast Club, the importance of reading the news isn’t measured by how much of the newspaper you finish, but by the habit of engaging with reliable information and challenging ideas.
Marriott envisions a future where those who value enriching their cognitive environments are the few who continue to subscribe to newspapers, while the vast majority abandon a literate culture for the endless scroll.
To borrow a metaphor from the podcast discussion, the reason to find time to keep reading the Free Press is to help build the ark we will need to save as many people as possible.
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