Most adults have at least known a time when effort was unavoidable (and satisfying when successfully exercised). But now, cowed by a Freudian-induced fear that tender psyches may be damaged by the effort of meeting high expectations, we prefer to absolve our children from the hard work which learning entails. So, in their reading, we give entertainment priority over enlightenment, countenancing simplified style and vocabulary, and embracing a proliferation of series, sequels, and television tie-ins. Reading will be easier, we’re convinced, and therefore more widely engaged in, if settings are recognisable, style is familiar, vocabulary is vernacular, if characters and milieux have already been established and if there’s an emphasis on easy visual content. (It’s trends I’m discussing here. I’m not ignoring the fact that some exceptional books use pictures to attract readers to worthwhile stories. But too often lavish illustration is used to mask weaknesses in the accompanying text.)

The makers of ‘interactive’ CD-ROMs and arrogantly labelled ‘living’ books would like us to forget that old-fashioned books are the most interactive devices ever conceived: readers create their own mental pictures, shape their own reactions, themselves give life to characters, set their own pace, define their own meanings, bring their own insights to bear – and all, miraculously, out of inert squiggles on lifeless paper. Yet some publishers seem to be on the verge of losing faith in books, not only as a means of making money but, worse, as a vehicle for complex ideas. They seem even to be shrinking from the notion itself that conveying complex ideas is a worthwhile endeavour. The slow, deep, reflective medium of print is seen as less easily saleable than instant, shallow, reactive media. Books must become ‘accessible’ – effortlessly amusing and, it’s vaunted, democratised. However, though access may indeed be effortless and open to all, the experience is insubstantial, as unsatisfying as eating white bread. Once the grist upon which imagination depends for exercise has been winnowed away, it grows harder to resist the temptation to choose media which demand no work from the imagination: after all, film, TV, and ‘interactive’ media can offer all the entertainment which, once, required the exercise of the imagination.

And while our imagination withers and the power of our own vision is undermined, the ‘infotainment’ industry (and its ‘edutainment’ partner) is happy to overload us with masses of inchoate, indiscriminate ‘information’, and then offer its own self-serving, dependency-creating hand out of the very confusion it has created, rather than helping us develop the critical faculty to determine for ourselves which information is worth having and why. Children, the consumers of the future, are particularly vulnerable to manipulation, for commerce knows, even if educators find it more comfortable to overlook, that our earliest years are our most formative.

Seduced by the promise of effortless learning, which implies effortless teaching, educators are adopting technologies which may actually make reading seem less, rather than more, worthwhile to children. For children may see no point at all in learning to read if every kind of entertainment and information is laid out with no need for a single brain cell to become engaged on more than a superficial level. If we insist that reading too should be no more than effortless amusement, it risks becoming, instead of an enlightening glimpse of otherness, only a narcissistic reaffirmation of self. Instead of imagining how we would act in other situations, or how we’d feel if we were another person, or how someone else might deal with difficulties greater than ours, we’ll be given reassuring mirror images of ourselves, images which confirm our prejudices, cement our view of our own righteousness.

If the rising generation is one whose exposure to new technologies is totally exclusive, it will be a generation of readers manqués, mind inactive, souls impoverished by those interested in manipulating them for their own crass ends. Purposefully cut off from their cultural history, they may be unable to distinguish empty novelty, false claims, unwise exhortations. Neither given, nor encouraged to seek, experiences which can be shared, vicariously or actually, by people different from them, how will these splintered audiences, ‘demographic segments’, advertisers’ easy prey, develop a sense of community, aspire to forge an accommodating and inclusive society? They’ll have been rendered unskilled in communicating with each other, uninterested in understanding anyone different from themselves, incapable of establishing the means of cooperation. They’ll take refuge in enclaves, build walls not bridges, be fearful of differences, not tolerant of them.

In the name of democratisation their lives may be effortlessly comfortable, but it will be at the expense not only of the imagination but also, paradoxically, of freedom. For as Marshall McLuhan warned thirty years ago in Understanding Media: ‘Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.’