Hello, I’m Wang Fang.

I’m delighted to join this 2026 World Book Day special, whose theme is “Do We Still Need an Old-Fashioned Literary Life?”

 

Honestly, I do not think printed books are strictly necessary today. No one will become unable to live, stupid, or bad for not reading them. But they do provide an experience that e-books have difficulty reproducing. For me, it may be a sense of embodiment—the psychological feedback produced by physical sensation.

When you turn to a particular page, your fingers remember the thickness of the paper, and your eyes remember a wonderful sentence in the third paragraph down on the left. These bodily, spatial sensations and memories matter to me. An e-book, by contrast, flows and has no weight. It can feel too smooth; I find it harder to build an imaginative picture of it from anything beyond the semantics of the text.

Of course, this is not an irreplaceable advantage. It is simply that, for me, the awkward weight of a printed book makes reading feel like a journey of mind and spirit, not merely the eyes retrieving and receiving information.

And a printed book has one function no e-book can match: I can take a coffee, find a sunny window, curl up comfortably, and read. A screen reflects glare, and I cannot bear to leave it baking in the sun.

 

Probably this: you go looking for a printed book; an information feed comes looking for you.

When we read, we are usually active. We decide which page to open, where to pause, and whether to return to a paragraph. We direct the process and control its rhythm.The feed is the opposite: it is designed to capture us. You may intend to view one item, yet half an hour later you are still scrolling and probably cannot remember what you saw.

A printed book leaves breathing room. In the fraction of a second required to turn a page, your eyes leave the text and your brain gets a tiny pause. A feed may give us no such interval; it would prefer that we never stop.

So printed books train active attention, while feeds train passive reaction.Modern society needs both capacities. But the latter may already be overtrained, while the former is, regrettably, withering.

 

It has changed enormously and unmistakably. My tolerance for long texts is falling. I once read dozens of pages without looking up; now, after a dozen or so, I want to reach for my phone.

For me, the change is both a problem and an adaptation. It is a problem because I have lost, or am losing, the capacity for deep immersion. It is an adaptation because I have learned to gather information more efficiently in fragmented pockets of time.

The key is that I do not want this adaptation to become surrender, so I deliberately do things that resist it.At weekends, for example, I put my phone on silent and leave it genuinely far away—beyond arm’s reach—then make myself read a printed book continuously for half an hour or an hour. This is not nostalgia; it preserves the ability to remain with one question for a long time. That capacity becomes precious and necessary when I write a paper, think deeply, or try to understand something truly complex.

 

For me, of course it does. The central problem is this: the processes we skip are precisely what form much of who we are, including our power of judgment.

When my students and I discuss this, we share a feeling: AI is so convenient and intelligent that we can enter a question and receive an answer in seconds. We gain a conclusion, but what do we lose? Perhaps the context that explains why the question was asked, the conditions under which the answer holds, or the comparison with alternative answers. A conclusion alone cannot supply those things.

Continually skipping the process may make us increasingly dependent on others to think for us.We are no longer actively coming to know something, but passively receiving it. That causes little trouble when information is simple and there is one answer. But truly complex problems—without a standard answer, requiring trade-offs and our own judgment—will challenge us.

What can we do? Take AI as an example. We need not accept its conclusion wholesale. Treat it as a starting point, then ask why it reached that conclusion, whether there are counterexamples, and what happens if a premise changes. We can even debate with it; the process itself is excellent training in critical thought.

I sometimes think there is also a deeper problem: many people demand conclusions not simply because they are unwilling to spend time, but because our whole culture keeps telling us that experience is optional and results are the only hard currency.Education values scores rather than learning; workplaces value KPIs rather than the experience of work; social media values likes rather than what we actually lived through.

In such an environment, people gradually internalize this logic.It is not that we do not care about experience. We have been trained from childhood to care only about outcomes. I think this fixation on results is a survival strategy shaped by our surroundings.The problem is that many essential human capacities—intuition, taste, empathy, and an understanding of complexity—grow only through the process.Skipping the process means skipping the part in which our humanity develops.

Therefore, rather than saying tools have made us stupid and lazy, we should say they have fully exposed a habit in which we may already have been trained: we were taught to want correct answers, not to be people who search for answers ourselves.That is not a technological problem, but something we have long been quietly taught.Of course, recognizing it is already the beginning of change. We can still choose for ourselves.

 

I believe we do need them. The reason is simple: efficiency removes what is “unnecessary,” but who decides what is unnecessary?

In a system that worships efficiency, anything that cannot be converted directly into output is dismissed as unnecessary waste. Daydreaming is waste, idle conversation is waste, reading a book with no immediate use is waste; even a romance that does not last is treated as waste.

So the question is not whether they are necessary, but what we want to become.

 

Not necessarily.

Reading is certainly one excellent path, but it is not the only one. A deep conversation within a relationship, spending time on a craft that requires sustained concentration, learning an instrument, or carefully tending a plant can all train concentration and patience. What matters is whether we can become wholly immersed for a period of time in something that offers no immediate feedback.

My own main methods remain reading and writing. Reading takes me into other people’s worlds; writing helps me organize my own. What they share is that neither can be accelerated. If a page takes a minute to read, that minute cannot be compressed to ten seconds. If a paragraph takes half an hour to write, there is no skipping it.That incompressibility is precisely their value. They force us to slow down, and only then can we see what speed makes invisible.

 

I worry quite a lot, because I do not see it as a more efficient division of labor. At heart, it is a surrender of our own agency.If you watch whatever an algorithm recommends and believe whatever a feed serves, are your interests eventually still yours, or merely a data-trained prediction of what “you may be interested in”? Your judgment may cease to be yours and become the repeatedly validated judgment of the majority.

It is efficient, of course, because we need not spend time exploring, filtering, and deciding. But the question is: if we let others decide even what interests us, what remains our own?

I do not object to outsourcing some cognitive labor to technology—for example, using maps to navigate rather than memorizing a route. But when the scope expands to curiosity, values, and the way we understand the world, we truly need to be vigilant.Once those things have been outsourced, we may never get them back.

 

I cannot think of many, but at my weekly meetings with students I still take notes by hand in a notebook. Looking around the room, I seem to be the only one.

I know typing is faster, easier to search, and more convenient to share. But I remain accustomed to handwriting—not merely from habit or nostalgia, but because the act itself helps me think. Research supports this: the patterns connecting different regions of the brain are much more complex and finely differentiated during handwriting than typing.

Writing with pen and paper is slow. That slowness gives me time to consider what my notes actually mean, whether a word is right, and whether the logic holds. Typing can be so fast that the fingers produce a sentence before thought has had time to ferment.The inefficiency of handwriting is its value: it forces you to linger over every word, and in that lingering thought occurs.Perhaps that is a kind of slow wisdom.

 

“Optimization” is a frightening word. I certainly choose efficient methods selectively, but I will defend some corners that cannot be optimized.

I am happy to use delivery apps to save cooking time, maps to save navigation time, and even AI to organize materials and polish language. These are tools, and used well they liberate us. But as far as possible, I will not let an algorithm decide what books I read, social recommendations decide whom I befriend, or majority opinion decide what I believe is right.

In summary, my bottom line is roughly this: any decision about “what kind of person I am” or “what kind of person I want to become” cannot be optimized.Those decisions concern meaning, not efficiency. You can optimize a route, but not a destination. You choose the destination yourself, and once you have chosen it, going more slowly, taking detours, or even making mistakes is still your life—not an arithmetic problem replaceable by an optimal solution.

That is all from me. I wish everyone well, and happy World Book Day. Bye!