Book Clubs—fighting warp speed

Book Clubs—fighting warp speed

Thursday, 13 September 2012 11:10

Someone put me onto video-blogger Gary Vaynerchuk. So I headed over to his website and listened to him talk about our "hyper-A.D.D." world—a world that operates at warp speed. Delivering his own message at warp speed—Vaynerchuk is a poster child for the very world he describes.

If you want to sell your products, he warns online marketers, you have to appeal to ever shorter attention spans. Life has changed: people no longer "sit on their bums" passively watching tv. They no longer...

...open the paper with a nice cup of coffee and get cereal and go through this nice and slow and enjoy it and get into the day.* Bad news, folks! The world got REAL FAST [my emphasis].

As he speaks, the video jumps back and forth between smart phones and computer tablets, doing everything from Buying to Banking—with snippets of books, news, tweets, and movies in between.

Vaynerchuk is right. But, for me, it's just one more reason to be grateful for book clubs. Don't get me wrong, I love online technology, absolutely love it! But with all our speed we risk losing the ability to absorb and digest the information we gather.

In a world that moves too fast to absorb and understand, I love the way book clubs luxuriate in lengthy books and long discussions. I love the way we plumb books for meaning, how we discover that their stories relate to our lives and our lives to their stories. And all of that takes time.

And book clubs make the time to learn from books and from each other. Not everything has to operate at warp speed—because when the world goes by so damn fast, we can't truly see it, we miss too much.

So...hooray for book clubs! And now, end of sermon.

* A beaut of a run-on sentence. Vaynerchuk doesn't brake for periods.