A bookclub catchphrase

The other day I happened across a slogan which I thought fitted the Rusiñol library bookclub. It read: "I'm not slow; I'm thinking."

In an era of fast machines, immediate AI answers and rapidfire TV talk, reflecting on what you see, read or hear means that your pace is going to be slower than that of your environment. Reading requires downtime; sharing in a bookclub demands that you also back up any thoughts you have about what you read. All this involves thinking twice and it slows output and the tempo of interactions.

In the early 60s Marshall McLuhan coined a famous phrase: “the medium is the message”. In short, the content is not the message; it's how you receive information that determines its meaning. He argued further that print reorganises our perception by cutting continuous spoken experience into visual units: letters, words, lines. This encourages habits of linearity, analysis and abstraction, a visual bias which reshapes our interpretation of reality. Reading is a private, solitary act that fosters interiority, detached judgment, and the sensation of being a neutral observer. More, literacy’s visual orientation transformed society by promoting abstraction and individualism, changing how societies remember, reason, and relate.

Yet, each medium sets conditions for later media to restore suppressed senses. Thus the written word’s dominance created the environment that today's electronic media challenge by reintegrating the auditory and participatory forms we experience through our screens.

McLuchan states that written language, shaped by literacy, fosters individualism and a sense of privacy, which can separate individuals from communal experiences. However, the positive message is that a bookclub integrates both oral and visual, social and solitary experiences. Other advantages of the slower pace enjoyed in reading and discussion is that it lessens stress, delivers more self-knowledge and encourages a critical approach to how you perceive life.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges, September, 2026)