A rare look heavenward from a busy workspace. Photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/241843728/}Striatic{/link} available under a Creative Commons license.
In this busy online world of text, quick emotional hits are easy. With a few clicks you can get a hit of intelligence (news headlines), amusement (web comics), or schadenfreude (celebrity gossip). But the bigger fish to catch is the deep satisfaction that comes after reading something challenging, informative, and in-depth—that spiritual refreshment you get after an evening curled up with a good book or magazine.
It’s not a matter of lacking good things to read. There are tons of materials out there.
Instead, our reading posture is part of the problem. We hunch over laptops. We poke and stroke our BlackBerries. We are frozen in these poses for work and even fun. When we curl up on the couch, we have in hand our hard-edged device that whirrs, overheats, or runs out of battery power.
Then, of course, there are the visual distractions. Any text we read on our computers, even in word processors, is bordered by buttons saying we can be somewhere else, checking out a new feature, or buying a product. Web writers fight to keep you reading with bold words, hyperlinks, and •bullets. It all gets rather noisy.
But it’s part of experiencing what some call “a second Gutenberg moment.” The ways we produce and consume the printed word are shifting radically. While technology is getting slicker and some people have already adjusted with ease (like you folks skimming this and The Brothers Karamazov on your iPhone), for most of us, concentrated online reading is still awkward.
Screens and spirituality
As with other content, quick Christian hits are easy to find, like the YouTube video on God’s omnipotence, or the passion play tweeted on Twitter. These have their place as experiments, but their sum amounts to a thin spirituality.
Christians shouldn’t let the reductive nature of the Internet prevent them from angling for that big fish of reading satisfaction, because this is what propels much of the spiritual life. Especially for ministry leaders, long stretches of attentive reading are essential, whether they contemplate the Psalms or wrestle with N. T. Wright. It’s not about abandoning book culture (long may it live!) but rather about finding ways to cultivate similar experiences in this new world of screen-staring.
One obvious starting point is to ensure that the text we post on the Internet is of good quality. We should be in but not of the online world—communicating well, but not diluting the richness of the gospel.
We can also reflect on how online reading evolved from an ancient activity. Back in the fourth century, St. Augustine was amazed to see his mentor St. Ambrose reading silently to himself. This showed him a new, interior way of digesting text beyond the read-aloud culture he was used to. Reading online is yet another shift: it’s still interior, but with a new tool that links our thinking brains to our typing fingers.
A friend of mine once said, “I can see the state of my soul when I try to concentrate on reading a novel.” With online reading, we see the states of our souls all too vividly. Not only do we tune in to our usual internal static, but we can act on these thoughts and impulses right away—thanks to the intimacy of the screen and the proximity of the keyboard.
These screen-and-keyboard selves can be nimble and productive, but they can also be easily distracted, prone to nasty comments, and self-indulgent. That news spoof site is always just two clicks away from your budget spreadsheet.
So maybe while we wait for comfier devices, we can work on these unique self-struggles of online reading. This, at least, is in the familiar Christian territory of spiritual discipline. We might just feel better reading online, get more done, and unlock the huge potential of this exciting new medium.
As for this mag
This here MinistryMatters, one of our most popular print resources, has joined the busy online world of text. After our last print edition one keen woman sent us a photo of her husband reading a (rather soggy) copy in the hot tub. “We’re glad that you’re in print,” she wrote. “We don’t like to read online!”
We understand. But we also hope that there are some pieces here that you consider worth your online reading discipline. And we also hope that you’re disciplined enough not to curl up and read this online magazine in the hot tub. Maybe someday.
