The Difference Between Escapism and Distraction
A couple times on this blog we’ve talked about how hard it is to get people to read fiction on the Internet. I already argued it has to do with the problems surrounding fiction:
-Readers prefer truth
-Men don’t really like it
-It needs to be highly curated
-We like our authors to be famous
But what I hadn’t thought about was that it could also have to do with the fact that we go to fiction books and the Internet for very different emotional functions.
The main benefit of reading something explicitly not true is escapism. Think about an 11-year-old boy who never gets to bring the cool snacks to lunch and gets picked on regularly for wearing loud wind pants. This kid doesn’t want to go home and read a biography of John Stewart. He wants to read about dragons and good and evil and other planets and freaky, big-boobed goddesses.
This is the most extreme form of escapism, but slipping into the surreal, made-up world of Haruki Murakami’s books can also put you in a strange dreamspace that makes you understand your life in a new way.
The act of reading a physical book is also a type of escapism. You can lay in your bed and feel safe, while your head is somewhere else altogether, or you can read a few pages while waiting in line for a breakfast burrito and forget where you are.
I don’t think we use the Internet for escapism. For me, I get these benefits out of going online:
-Social benefits (tweeting, talking, making plans, making friends, stalking)
-Staying up-to-date
-Discovering new things
-Learning (Wikipedia)
-Distraction
Distraction is probably as close as our Internet use gets to escapism. We never really leave our lives – I might be looking at crazy mountains on Tumblr, but I’m still stopping to check my Facebook notifications. Both fiction books and the Internet help us turn our heads away from our problems for awhile, but the Internet only gets us halfway there.
The funny thing is, while it helps us become distracted from our own lives, it’s too distracting to let us fully escape. That’s why it’s hard to read fiction on the Internet. Its major benefit to us is canceled out by all the extra noise.