“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” – Mark Twain
WELCOME to another Saturday of Digital Zen.
I spent two weeks in the Peninsula. Seremban. Bukit Jalil. Shopping malls. Cafes. LRT platforms. Waiting rooms. Parks.
I didn’t see a single person reading a newspaper.
Not one magazine in hand. Not one book being held, pages turned, attention sustained. Just screens. Endless scrolling. Thumbs moving. Eyes glazed. The same motion everywhere, like a tic the entire population share but nobody acknowledges.
This isn’t nostalgia talking. This is observation.
Something has been lost. Not just replaced – lost. And what’s been lost isn’t just the newspaper or the magazine or the book as object.
It’s the practice. The discipline. The weight of holding something physical and decoding its meaning with your full attention.
And if you think this doesn’t matter, if you think digital is just a better version of the same thing – you’re not paying attention.
The Quran parallel
There’s a tradition in Malaysia – particularly strong in certain communities – of reciting the Quran beautifully. Melodiously. The art of tajwid, of making the verses flow like music. It’s revered. It’s taught. It’s performed at weddings, funerals, state events.
But here’s what nobody says out loud: most of the people reciting it – beautifully, flawlessly – have no idea what they’re saying.
They’ve memorised the sounds. The rhythm. The pronunciation. But the meaning? The message inside the words? That’s secondary. Sometimes absent entirely.
The Quran was revealed to be read. To be understood. To be decoded. To transform the reader through comprehension, not just performance.
What we’ve done instead is turn it into theatre. Beautiful, yes. Reverent, certainly. But disconnected from its purpose.
The same thing has happened to reading itself.
We’ve replaced the practice of decoding meaning – the slow, deliberate act of sitting with text and extracting understanding – with the performance of consumption. Skimming headlines.
Scrolling summaries. Absorbing nothing. Retaining less.
The device doesn’t help. It accelerates the problem.
What paper does that screens don’t
There’s research now. Neuroscience confirming what anyone who’s ever read both a physical book and a PDF already knows intuitively.
Reading on paper activates different neural pathways than reading on screens. Physical text engages spatial memory – you remember where on the page something appeared, which part of the book you were holding. This creates cognitive anchors that aid comprehension and retention.
Screens eliminate this. Everything is the same scroll. The same swipe. No spatial memory. No anchors. Just an endless feed that your brain processes more like television than text.
Studies show people reading on screens comprehend less, retain less, and experience more cognitive fatigue than those reading the same material on paper.
But it’s worse than that.
Screens train distraction. The medium itself encourages interruption – notifications, hyperlinks, the urge to switch tabs.
Your brain learns to fragment attention, not sustain it.
Paper forces focus. You can’t hyperlink away from a difficult paragraph.
You can’t refresh the page when your attention wanes. You have to sit with it. Decode it. Understand it.
That friction – the thing that feels like inconvenience – is actually the feature. It’s the discipline.
It’s what builds the capacity to think deeply about anything at all.
Sarawak Tribune still prints
In 2026, the Sarawak Tribune still publishes a physical newspaper. Every day. Ink on paper. Delivered to doorsteps and sold at newsstands.
To Peninsular Malaysians, this is almost quaint. Rare. Like seeing a rotary phone still in use.
To me, it’s providence.
Because while the Peninsula has abandoned physical media almost entirely – hollowed out by the same digital – first logic that now governs everything – Sarawak keeps the practice alive.
Not out of nostalgia. Out of values.
Sarawakians understand something the rest of the country has forgotten: that how you deliver information shapes how people receive it. That the medium isn’t neutral. That there’s a difference between scrolling through headlines on your phone while half-watching Netflix and sitting down with a newspaper, unfolding it, reading it front to back with your full attention.
The Tribune‘s continued existence isn’t just about news. It’s about maintaining a standard. A discipline. A way of engaging with the world that requires more than passive consumption.
It’s about keeping the practice alive.
What parents have forgotten
If you’re raising children right now, here’s what you need to know.
A child who grows up reading on screens develops a fundamentally different relationship with text than a child who reads books, newspapers, magazines.
The screen-raised child learns to skim. To scan for keywords. To extract surface-level information quickly and move on.
The paper-raised child learns to sustain attention. To sit with complexity. To build the neural infrastructure for deep reading – the kind that allows them to understand difficult concepts, follow multi-layered arguments, and think critically about what they’re consuming.
This isn’t about being anti-technology. It’s about understanding what different technologies do to developing brains.
You can’t raise a generation on infinite scroll and expect them to develop the cognitive capacity for sustained thought. It doesn’t work that way.
The research is unambiguous: children who read physical books outperform their screen-only peers in comprehension, retention, and critical thinking. Not by small margins. By significant ones.
But here’s what nobody wants to hear: your child won’t choose paper over screen unless you model it.
If they see you scrolling endlessly, they’ll scroll endlessly.
If they see you reading the Saturday paper, front to back, with coffee and focus – they’ll learn that this is what reading looks like.
The practice is transmitted person to person. Parent to child. Teacher to student. It’s not automatic. It’s not inevitable. It requires intention.
The practice
This Saturday, buy the Sarawak Tribune. Not online. The physical paper. Unfold it. Read it front to back. Not skimming – reading. Decoding. Understanding.
If you have children, read it with them. Let them see you sustain attention on something that isn’t a screen. Let them hold the paper. Let them turn the pages.
Explain what you’re reading. Why it matters. What the writer is arguing. How you know if it’s true.
Teach them that reading isn’t just receiving information. It’s an active practice. A discipline. A way of engaging with the world that builds the capacity to think clearly about anything at all.
This isn’t nostalgia.
This is survival.
Because the ability to read deeply, to decode meaning, to sit with complexity without fragmenting into distraction – this is what separates a thinking population from a managed
one.
And right now, we’re losing it.
One scroll at a time.
● Sufian Mohidin produces electronic music as Maqluk (YouTube) and writes on the intersection of technology, philosophy, and human experience.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at sufiansarawak@gmail.com.
