She writes that, "Personalities like Timothée Chalamet, Kaia Gerber, and YouTube sensation Emma Chamberlain have promoted reading as a way to relax, learn, and escape the toxic world of social media."
I have no idea who these people are, but if they're promoting books instead of mindlessly grazing through the various social media sites, they have something to say that's worth listening to. Bodor goes on to tell us that,
In her YouTube video, titled “Reading Makes You Hot,” which has more than 3.8 million views, Chamberlain describes how reading alleviates her anxiety and depression. She explains, “Reading is harmless. Going on social media is not harmless. It makes you sad, it makes you compare yourself to other people, it makes you depressed.”There's much more at the link on Bodor's view of the harm social media is doing to our young people's brains and bodies, and it's all worth taking the time to read. Here's one excerpt:
Since this video was released, Chamberlain has quit TikTok entirely and limited her Instagram usage, citing mental health reasons.
Millions of teens and young adults can relate to Chamberlain’s experience, and research has found a definite causal relationship between social media and depression. A study conducted by the University of Arkansas found that young adults who spent more than 300 minutes a day on social media platforms were “2.8 times as likely to become depressed within six months” than those who spent 120 minutes or less on social media.
According to Nicholas Carr’s bestselling book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” the exhaustion many users experience after engaging with social media stems from the fact that “our social standing is, in one way or another, always in play, always at risk. The resulting self-consciousness — even, at times, fear — magnifies the intensity of our involvement with the medium. That’s true for everyone, but it’s particularly true for the young.”
Thus, trying to relax through social media is a contradiction of terms. A social media user is not only subject to the myriad auditory, visual, and somatosensory cues put forth by the medium (think of TikTok’s addictive combination of music, fast-paced video content, and “swiping up” to see more), but is also perpetually conscious of his own status and social perception.
In a virtual world governed by likes and dislikes, the danger of being ignored or even “canceled” is an ever-present threat.
Reading comprehension has been declining in America for years, and lockdowns only exacerbated the situation. But Carr reassures us that rewiring your brain is possible. With enough training, those skills of deep concentration and focus can be relearned, or developed for the first time.In her last section she says this:
Just make sure to hide your smartphone while you practice. A 2017 study at the University of Texas found that students whose phones were in plain sight performed more poorly on a series of tests than students who left their phones in a bag or in a different room altogether. “As the smartphone becomes more noticeable, participants’ available cognitive capacity decreases,” explained Adrian Ward, one of the study’s authors.
If you want to incorporate leisure reading into your routine, classical literature is a great place to start. When you read the classics, you interact with the ideas of the greatest minds in human history.I agree. Reading the classics is not easy, it takes time and effort, but the rewards make the effort worth it.
Spencer Baum declares classical literature “essential medicine in the age of social media.” He explains, “When you read Melville (or Hugo or Austen or Tolstoy or Plato or Shakespeare) you are sharing headspace with someone who is much better at slow, deep, meaningful thinking than you are because they’ve never lived in the shallows like you do.”
I've acknowledged in other posts that I'm very reluctant to recommend particular books to people because what appeals to me usually doesn't appeal to others, but if I were asked what my favorite classical novels are, I'd probably list the following (although there are a lot of others that are really hard to leave off the list.):
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
- Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- 1984 by George Orwell
