Sir Francis bacon, 400 years ago, writes,
“Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
He never met catchy social media apps. If he had, he must have added in his essay, “…and scrolling maketh a distracted man.”
That’s a huge tug-of-war our youth is dealing with nowadays. One side show, the slow weight of books that needs patience, insight, demands depth and mind filled with pages to turn. On the other side there is, a timeless scroll, that provides everything asked and demands nothing but a thumb movement. One thing builds fullness, while the other needs attention.
So, the point is, who is winning youth’s attention, whom our teens prefer.
We see that though scroll culture is easy to access, but it has short content, it cannot engage the viewer in deep, profound thoughts. It cannot lead a person to meditate and then comprehend. Scroll culture sure is fascinating but it cannot capture the viewer’s attention.
While book culture teaches patience, calmness, insight and meditation. It fascinates the reader as he/she reads the content page by page. It ignites curiosity in the readers mind because of the realistic events and grabs the attention of the reader from the first page till the last. It intrigues the mind of the reader and keep them under the spell of a piece of writing for many years.
Scrolling culture is stealing the ability of thinking and finding deep meanings of words and phrases from youth. They want everything fastly just on a click. They are losing their ability of pondering over a problem and thinking/searching for a solution. They just rely on short term content; hence they have a short-term memory, and limited information about any topic or question.Now-a-days, scroll culture and excessive screen time has made our youth passive. Addictive form of entertainment through social media has reduced their interest and time for literature.
People who are still used to reading books frequently, claim that it has a profound effect on their mental tranquillity and skill development. They find themselves deeply engaged with that piece of writing. Their focus improves and they can focus longer and feel the words deeply, though these people are fewer in number.
We can see that there is hybrid group of youth nowadays. As noted from research on university students, that some of them increasingly balancing both; book culture and scroll culture. Many read for leisure or pleasure or either to get more knowledge about their specific degree, while simultaneously digital content and limiting to either news updates or for social interactions, but they are a mere drop in the ocean.
Now, back to the initiating point, who’s winning the youth over, of course, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it is the scroll culture. But book culture still has its place in this digitally affected world, though not as vast.
Scrolling culture is beating book culture by time and taps. Quick, short, content and entertainment are rule, but print media (in forms of newspaper, books) still has persistent influence on youth’s intellectual development. Nevertheless, this does not show a complete displacement of books.
Both cultures go side by side, though the ratio is obvious. Kids are lost in the light of screens, while some are still here to feel the scent of literature through the pages of books.
Author Ms Mariam Waqas
Visiting Lecturer (English) in Department of Humanities UAAR
can be contacted at email: mariamrana9810@gmail.com
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