Response to the 2013 ISTD brief 'Books still?'

 

In today’s society, reading is an essential part of our every day lives and we often strive for the fastest and simplest way of communicating and consuming information. This can of course be useful where on a daily basis we find ourselves aggressively bombarded with messages and in situations that require us to quickly read timetables, advertisements, or navigate way-finding systems etc.

 

However, this method of distilling messages comes at a price. What we gain in time, we loose in detail, subtlety and context. It is this reductive approach that can cause a text to lack coherence, become misleading and therefore conceal the truth.