I’ve posted about Shelfari before, but I feel compelled to do so again. As I say in my profile, it’s the thinking person’s MySpace. The site has grown by leaps and bounds since I accidentally invited everyone in my email address book to it last October. And rather than discarding my invites as the junk mail they were, fifty of my contacts were intrigued enough to join the site. Virtual reading groups have cropped up, books have been reviewed and rated, just about anything that has been published is now part of their catalogue.
The cover story in this month’s Atlantic, Is Google Making Us Stupid looks at the ways in which the internet may be rewiring our brains to make sustained concentration more challenging. This seems likely, as we jump from one hyperlink to another, constantly battling incoming emails, news updates, search engine distractions. Right now I’d set out to pay my bills online, and should be doing my homework, but I ended up on Shelfari which took me to blog about it, next I’ll likely check out what’s new at Flickr. Sustained focus has never been my strongpoint, and the internet makes it easier to feed what Dan Millman calls our “monkey brains” jumping from one tree to the next.
But Shelfari, part of the problem and part of the solution, lets us network about something we all love and miss: reading books. To be a part of that community, we need to walk away from our computers, pull the plug from our overly wired lives and settle in with a book. The success of this networking site gives me hope that READING IS ALIVE AND WELL. Check out my profile here, and Alice’s here. Join the reading revolution.