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What Phones Are Doing to Reading
It’s becoming harder, or at least less common, to read the old-fashioned way. But the new ways of reading are not all bad.
There are plenty of theories about why this is happening, involving broad finger-pointing toward the Internet or the ongoing influence of television, or even shifting labor conditions, as more women have entered the workforce. But I have found myself wondering whether we actually live in a world forcibly shaped by algorithms or whether our phones themselves—their fiddly buttons, their flashing screens, their slight but satisfying heft—have other, more fundamental ways of making us lazy. Over the years, I told a handful of other surfers about the links between Brautigan and this spot, and later, whenever I would make it back out there, I would see the cropping of little houses on the hill overlooking the ocean, many of them with chicken runs and ruined vegetable-garden projects, and I would think to myself, with a great deal of embarrassment, that I still hadn’t actually finished “Trout Fishing in America.” Little compulsions like that one probably determine our online behavior more than we would like to admit.
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