SOCIAL media nowadays tells us to make the lie big; make it simple; keep repeating it till it eventually devours the truth. One of my friends recently asked me to join Twitter space on the prevailing economic situation in Pakistan. I simply told him I did not have an account. He wondered how I was preparing for an upcoming competitive examination if I was not following trends on social media. I wondered if his words had any logic.

It is fine to use social media to get oneself updated, but it is not enough to compete with the rapidly transforming world. That is why many influential personalities and billionaires, and even people in developing countries, spend their time reading books.

A report claimed that Bill Gates still reads 52 books a year; meaning a book every week. In 2021, a WorldAtlas report claimed that India topped the list of countries where citizens spent 10 hours and 42 minutes with books per week on average, followed by Thailand and China, while Japan and South Korea were successful in notching up the last two spots on the list that assessed 30 nations in terms of average time spent with books per person per week. However, it was not mentioned what type of medium/material was read, which could be online news, work e-mails, magazines and books in print.

It is pertinent to discuss about our nation vis-à-vis book reading. In 2019, a pre-pandemic survey conducted by Gallup and Gilani, an affiliate of Gallup International, released its survey report on reading habits. It claimed that 75 per cent of the respondents said they do not read books at all. The 25pc who read included those reading course books, religious literature, and magazines, but not regularly. This should not surprise us, considering our appalling literacy rate because we have also lagged far behind south Asian nations that have literacy rates of about 75pc.

In 2021, there were 61.34 million internet users (27.5pc), and there were 46 million social media users (20.6pc) in Pakistan out of the national population. But, unfortunately, we do not have even an outdated survey of how many hours are being spent reading books by Pakistanis per week.

The abysmal state of education produces the ‘uneducated educated’. We like adopting shortcuts, and social media is a shortcut to having a feeling of being informed. It is a delusion. This makes our thinking limited and destroys our critical analysis on any topic.

Pakistani leadership and the country’s youth ought to be sincere if they want to survive and compete in this fast trans-forming world. It is time we consulted books for knowledge and information rather than the internet and social media which have their own pitfalls and perils in the form of fake or misleading content that can lead one to dangerous conclusions.

Rao Zaid Zulfiqar
Ghotki

Published in Dawn, June 6th, 2022