Do You Want Stronger Community? Learn to Read Well.

Our attention is in demand, but the quality of our attention often doesn’t matter to those who demand it. Few in our attention economy seek our contemplative focus. Most demand our restless scroll, our aimless click. They seek what Henry David Thoreau describes as our “macadamized” mind—thoughts reduced to the size of cobblestones and stuck together randomly.

We may feel the competition for our attention is particularly acute in our time, but Augustine of Hippo felt similar pressure in the fourth century. Augustine longed to turn his attention away from worldly concerns and toward his studies, but he didn’t long to be alone with his books. In his Confessions, Augustine wrote,

To make conversation, to share a joke, to perform mutual acts of kindness, to read together well-written books, to share in trifling and in serious matters, to disagree though without animosity—just as a person debates with himself—and in the very rarity of disagreement to find the salt of normal harmony, to teach each other something or to learn from one another, to long with impatience for those absent, to welcome them with gladness on their arrival. These and other signs come from the heart of those who love and are loved.

Similarly, in Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope, Jeffrey Bilbro, associate professor of English at Grove City College, argues that the antidote to a macadamized mind is friendship with the authors who went before us and with the readers who sit beside us. The remedy for the weariness caused by endless demands on our attention isn’t solitude or mindless relaxation but rather books and conversation.

Fragmentation of Techno-Optimism

Our fragmented attention has recently been the subject of many fine books. For example, Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation and Alan Noble’s Disruptive Witness address the problem from a secular and a Christian perspective respectively.

Bilbro looks at the problem through the lens of 19th-century literature. He draws on an impressive list of antebellum writers, including Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, and Margaret Fuller. He also glances backward at American founding figures in the 18th century, such as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Rush.

Bilbro argues that new communication technologies are accompanied by a “techno-optimism” that sees technology—be it industrialized print in the 19th century or social media in recent years—as a way of creating a broad and seamless consensus around one authoritative view. Bilbro then examines a pessimistic reaction to this optimism, as those oppressed or exploited by this consensus seek to escape its dominance.

Bilbro’s critique of techno-optimism uncovers intriguing parallels between the 19th century and today. For example, poet Walt Whitman’s characteristic gestures of intimacy with his readers prefigure the self-display that typifies Instagram influencers. Both are hollow at heart, Bilbro argues, as “the intimacy offered by both Whitman and the Insta-poets remains asymmetric: individual readers may feel a powerful emotional connection to the poet who seems to be baring his or her soul. The poets themselves, however, remain detached and aloof from the emotional lives of their readers or fans” (74). Such false company only leaves us lonelier.

Unification Within Little Platoons

We’re more than autonomous, interchangeable consuming units. Human flourishing requires what Edmund Burke called “little platoons,” those immediate attachments that give our lives meaning beyond our individual desires. We’re embedded in communities like families, churches, and neighborhoods. Techno-optimism threatens those bonds.

For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s techno-optimism imagines each of us as a “transparent eyeball” unchained from tradition, community, and kinship, fully equipped to access truth without mediation. Emerson thus contributes to the deterioration of the essential Reformation project of reading the Bible for yourself into the superficial practice of reading the Bible entirely by yourself. His perspective fragments the foundations of the church as a community focused on understanding and applying Scripture together.

We often think of great writers as rebels against the materialist zeitgeist, yet Emerson’s brand of transcendentalist freedom serves the ethos of the atomized consumer. Are you unhindered by any creed? Buy this “coexist” bumper sticker. Buy this Mercedes to put it on. Untethered from mediating and contextualizing communities, we become easy prey for those who sell us new identities each morning. Worse, we become sitting ducks for those who liberate us from tradition only to enslave us to the regime of the moment.

Bilbro offers in juxtaposition to the solipsistic Emerson the notoriously reticent poet Emily Dickinson, demonstrating how Dickinson’s seeming reclusiveness evidences a deeper form of community. Dickinson refused to participate in industrial print, preferring to circulate her work in a more personal, epistolary manner. According to Bilbro, Dickinson “shares her soul’s art in these marginal human and relational contexts because she saw the end of language as well-tended relationships rather than fame or profits” (143). She wrote poems for people she knew personally. If we, too, saw relationships as the goal of writing, perhaps we’d still publish, but would we tweet?

Pilgrimage of Friendship

Yet media technology isn’t the problem. It’s how we use it. We can reject technological determinism and isolating uses of technology and embrace instead a hopeful and convivial use of words. Thoreau, Fuller, Hawthorne, and Melville, for example, “imagined practices that might help us read and write in ways that foster this kind of interdependent, participatory society” (165). This requires a better set of metaphors for reading.

Chief among these metaphors is walking. In the casual stroll and the pilgrimage, we experience the world not as a map we comprehend in total from above but as something we’re in and part of. In walking, we encounter nature and other people at eye level and at a pace that enables focused attention and even conversation.

We should read as if walking. Bilbro writes,

We can read slowly. We can wrestle with old books. We can memorize passages. We can discuss difficult texts with friends who interpret them differently. Further, we can contribute to communities of practice that honor and foster verbal virtues such as attention, magnanimity, care, and patience. (229)

Such communities can exist in our age of fragmented attention and hyperindividualism. Bilbro offers a vision of textual community that can reshape the way Christians view their reading practices.

Words for Conviviality demonstrates that if we wish to create a more convivial world in which conversation predominates over dictation, we must learn to walk again. We must meet each other at eye level, not as all-seeing and autonomous “transparent eyeballs” but, rather, as fellow pilgrims.