138. Choosing your intellectual partners in the age of social networks
I’ve grown concerned lately by the apparent difficulty that internet age natives have reading books. Snapchat and Instagram are always there, demanding attention whenever they dare lay down their device to immerse themselves in a book. The risk is that the quality of content we receive from social networks is a lot lower than from books. Not because people today are less creative or capable but rather because, with books, we get not only the very best of each period in human history, but also mostly only what has withstood scrutiny by subsequent generations. 10 or20 may have made it from each decade, the best, rising from a cacophony of completely forgettable heaps of less valuable content. When we put down our book to check Snapchat, we prioritise the forgettable cacophony of now over the very best selected for us by millions of readers before us. It is tantamount to rejecting a 1967 Margaux to drink a recently harvested, run of the mill wine (and I am being kind to social networks)
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