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| What better way to start a post about reading for adults with a younger me reading a children's book |
Wishing to read more books sits at the same cultural level as wishing to go to the gym. It's both about flexing muscles (the brain is a muscle), it ends up in everyone's New Year resolutions lists, and people most people give up halfway through (including me) as have to walk in shame for the remainder of the year.
Like going to the gym, everything is done for a purpose. For some it's to lose weight, for others it's all about the lifestyle. But deep down I'm sure for many it's to show off. We're social creatures and we want to infiltrate groups we want to be a part of. When you said reading books, I'm sure it's so that you can be part of smarter conversations. If you can't reference them, it's as if there's a council that has predetermined that you should be shamed. It's books like Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari you're talking about. And honestly, I had to Google to get the spelling right.
But here's the thing, if you feel intimidated reading heavy material and buying them off year end, new year or whatever excuse people use for discounts, then you are right to feel so.
As an avid book reader myself, I consider it as an elitist act expecting social circles to catch up reading bestsellers all the time.
Intimidation, Remix Culture & Gateway Material
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| If Umberto Eco is too intimating, read graphic guides with cute cartoons (well, nazis are never cute, but you get my point) |
Most of your friends who are reading those THICC books are probably lifelong readers. They read Peter and Jane when they were kids and devoured the neoliberal Bible, Harry Potter in their tweens. Soon as they finished, they picked up non-fiction books and stood at elevated platforms to look at you staring back up to them from beneath their shadows.
These are the same kids who churn out factoids and aced their exams. Now that you're older and feel like catching up to do, you're afraid of people mocking Peter and Jane, and too afraid of neoliberalism. So you want to jump straight into the heavyweights, and so you can quickly understand inside jokes about neoliberalism.
But we live in the age of remix culture. Mashups aren't just a thing on YouTube and that cousin of yours on sound loud. We live in an age where the heavy books exist as source material and there are a thousand books out there that have distilled the core knowledge of prior. Get into How To books or Graphic Guides of specific topics. You don't have to read Leviathan and it's overly complex language to understand it. Read the supplementary texts first.
Don't be afraid to have things explained like you're five. (If you've read it you'll get it. :p) The smart kids had the privilege to have people explain things to them at a young age when they're stupid as a bag of bricks.
Besides, if the authors cared more about spreading knowledge in the first place, they wouldn't have written it with jargon. Not everyone is Carl Sagan so it's up to you to find your interest's equivalent of Carl Sagan.
But let me take this to the next level here:
Honestly, Reading Books Today is Overrated
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| Plomo o Plato? Whatever man, I don't even speak Greek |
I'm not saying we should go out and burn books. No. I say there is a time and place to it. I'm not even saying the alternative is ebooks because of some green argument.
I'm saying that seeing book reading as the pinnacle of intellectualism is a farce.
Books are nothing more than just a medium to transmit information. Plato once argued that writing is bad because it harms memory. First of all the argument is stupid and fuck Plato. But secondly, Plato has a point about the transmission of knowledge, it’s in the mind and it's amorphous. He is wrong about the power of writing but he is correct about how knowledge exists independent of the medium.
Again, in a world of remixes, there are countless mediums out there that transmit knowledge. For eons, making has used oral storytelling to pass down information.
Today, we have podcasts, services like Audible (Please sponsor me, I'm broke after moving into a new apartment, k) and video essays on YouTube by idealistic idiots who believe in free education. (Can you believe that?)
So much of writing is coded in classist language that has excluded knowledge from those who needed it most. Having someone explaining ideas to you without the cons of saliva flying into your face is an extension of an age-old tradition. Conversational tones can make things less intimidating and accessible. It's time for you to utilize it.
So maybe rather than having just books in your resolution, make it a point to watch more video essays from Philosophy Tube, Contrapoints, oh god forbid, Nerdwriter.
Heck. I coach debates and I know college-aged students as lazy to read. I'm convinced a huge chunk of their knowledge came from me berating them and fact-checking them in adjudication feedback. I'm sure they went on to look up things in Wikipedia right after I explained ideas to them over dinner right after debate training.
Memes, The Alt Right, and Hardcore Punk Lyricism
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| Richard Spencer or the guy from Deafheaven? Like idk man. |
Now politically, I am definitely far from the alt right. But I've always been jealous with how well people like Richard Spencer knows the nature of information. From how it flows to how it spreads.
Spencer's thoughts on race and politics do nothing for me but his opinion on knowledge is interesting. He argued that we are entering an era of "post-literacy." The general masses get information outside of books and academia but absorb it from their surroundings.
This I suppose is why he quickly embraced Memes on 4chan and saw it as a political force. Outside of Spencer, but not in total opposition of the alt-right, Trump of all people understood the political power of Twitter. To many, to spend so much time on a platform where teenagers and young adults post death threats to their favorite outlet stores, is unpresidential. But Trump understood pop culture and knows how to use it to his advantage. His shirt, punchy tweets are a perfect vehicle of demagoguery and sloganeering. Even before the era of meme magick, punk bands used their sloganeering skills to promote their brand of left-wing ideas, anarchism, and anti-authoritarian thought. When I was 15, I didn't know who the hell was Bakunin or Kropotkin. But I knew who the line “No Gods, No Masters” because I saw the line on some smelly crust punk's vest. I knew nothing about the Vietnam war as a teen but I knew it sucked because of Napalm Death lyrics.
Slowly, other parts of the meme economy are using this as a method to get information across. The content of books is turned inside out and turned into memes with its arguments turned into digestible jokes. Honestly, I've learned so much about political compasses and political philosophy through memes that it drove me to read more books as supplementary material to gain a deeper understanding of the jokes. And also so I can join in on the shitposting.
Happy New Year, Happy New Outlook
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| Guys, I'm scared. Is this Deafheaven or Richard Spencer? |
All this can be misconstrued as anti-intellectualism. But it's not. It's intellectualism with a different skin.
Also this isn't a call to action to stop reading. Nor am I shaming those who chose to read. Instead, we need to reevaluate why do we put books on such a high pedestal.
In this new year, I hope we stop seeing books as a marker of the educated when it could as well be a marker of social class. I hope we see shitposters in a different light and people who go on YouTube as the same kind of people who were browsing library books.
After all, if some racist bastard whose claim to fame is being punched in the face by an anarchist protestor, with a name that is shortened to Dick by Western civilization can understand this shift on how information is spread, then I'm sure you can.
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