I was thinking about the posters people encounter in public libraries everywhere. Specifically, the posters that show various authors, musicians, athletes, or film actors holding young adult novels and grinning under block letters that spell the word “READ.”
Encouraging people, especially kids, to read is as important as ever, but another issue that continues to grow in importance is this: how does the Internet change how newer generations should read? If we consider the popularity and interactivity of the Internet, people are reading—and writing—at extraordinary rates. It’s easy to view Internet browsing as consuming information rather than actually reading, but Internet use is a constant negotiation of stories, opinions, explanations, and dialogues. The generic concept of reading encouraged by schools and libraries has evolved into something that involves physical books but is not limited to them.
But here’s another crazy aspect of the explosion of text: as the Internet increasingly becomes the primary place where many people read, a person’s tastes and social personality become more and more reflective of things created or written about somewhere far away. The idea of local culture becomes altered by something other, a set of self-chosen reference points in our chaotic information galaxy. It’s a bizarre experience to read an article a website across the country has written about an artist in my own town.
One of the Internet’s many consequences is the possibility of getting overwhelmed by its possibilities to the point where it becomes more appealing to keep to just a few sources of information. Sidestepping the question of trustworthiness—whether my favorite sites are run by conspiracy theorists or are biased to the point of giving misinformation—a reliance on just a few sources can lock me in to a particular way of perceiving and thinking about the world. This possibility becomes dangerous, even if I acknowledge in the back of my mind that the Internet has more power to inform me than I could ever imagine. When reading, it becomes necessary to remember that anything written exists within an increasingly complex and interactive human world, to keep an open mind and a critical eye simultaneously.
Here’s why music matters: a piece of music allows its listener insight into the unique way its creators perceive their surroundings. Because no one piece of music can hope to tell us the whole truth about human existence, listening to music is a process of opening ourselves to new ideas and placing those ideas in a larger context, complicating and widening how we understand the world. The best music, I think, makes us feel emotions we never knew we could feel, instilling the sense that that music—or any work of art, or any writing—is but one of a near infinity of lenses through which we can examine the world around us. Then, music that challenges us, music that invites us to contemplate it, can help us sharpen the ways we read in a chaotic time.
