I was recently flipping through one of my mother's magazines, Good Housekeeping I think. I came across an advertisement that I loved. It's only one page but it conveys a big message. The title said “We surf the Internet. We swim in magazines”. This is absolutely true. While on the internet, we skim the surface and jump from page to page, never really digging any deeper. In magazines or books we immerse ourselves in the written word.
Once in a while I will be reading an amazing book that has me totally enthralled. When I take a break from reading it, I usually think of it as coming up for air. It’s a metaphor that I particularly love and when I share it with other booklovers, they agree that it perfectly describes the sensation of pausing whilst reading. When you are reading a really great book it is like being underwater. All other sounds and distractions fade to indistinct echoes of a world happening outside of the one you are reading about. If I am especially engrossed in a book and then suddenly startled out of it, it is a shock to my system, like coming up to the surface to fast. It takes me a moment to readjust to what is happening.
However, I still love surfing the internet (I would like to learn to actually surf as well but that’s beside the point). It’s fun and, like real surfing, faster paced than going for a swim in a book. Surfing keeps you just above the surface and makes it easy to move around from place to place. Perhaps it is the weight of the physical aspect of the magazine that holds one under the metaphorical water. But being underwater isn’t necessary a bad place to be.
Here is the ad of which I spoke:
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