In 2015, a survey by National Endowment for the Arts reported that only 43% of Americans read for pleasure - the lowest result for the NEA in over 30 years (1). If we are to believe reports like this, the art of reading is in decline, and fewer people are reading for pleasure. Reading is dying a slow, quiet death. I wonder whether you are supposed to be reading this.
The death of reading starts, apparently, with the rise of broadcasting. As early as 1936 we have heard the alarming threats to the art of reading. On May 12, for instance, the New York Times reported on Sinclair Lewis’ reassurances to the Association of Booksellers about radio and television, a speech made in response to the cries about motion pictures and radio, the ‘enemies of the book’ (2). Unfortunately, his optimism seems to have been temporary. By 1961, William Belson from the London School of Economics deemed the threat of television on reading worthy of serious empirical research (3). By 1980, television had become known as ‘the electronic pied piper’, with children of 12 years and younger reportedly spending a shocking “two hours per day (including school days) viewing television”. Were these children reading at all? Yes, apparently in 1980, children were spending “30 minutes reading (not schoolwork)” (4). There was still hope.
Then came computer games. These not only caused delinquency, apparently, but reportedly took away valuable time from learning and, therefore, a decrease in reading and writing skills (5). But if reading was suffering from potentially fatal hemorrhaging then, things got even worse with the introduction of the internet. Now you’d think that the internet, with its millions of pages of interesting text, would be a boon for reading. Not only was the internet full of text about museums and history (and more), along with it came the age of free books, e-readers of various sorts, a fantastic array of blogs, online news - and more (of course). How on earth could the internet be a threat to reading with this buffet available?
Well, there were two areas of concern. First, the internet threatened an attack on the whole basis of reading. Considering the amount of non-reading content available to consumers, things like youtube or audiobooks, reading as a leisure pastime seems at risk of a quick and final death. The rise of visual content threatens a death knell for reading (6). Consider when you last saw a youngster sitting in a public space reading a book. More likely, you’ve seen groups of teens huddled together, each engrossed in their own screen: watching YouTube, posting selfies on Instagram, liking a photograph of someone’s breakfast on Facebook. The aged, like me, shudder. With all the screen time comes devilishly short texts with poorly considered language. The focus is on the visuals, the pictures, the videos. Hardly much here that can be considered serious reading.
The second problem which rises from the internet’s influence over reading comes from all the live, free and interesting content available online. With so much interesting stuff available at the click of a button, the demise of old-fashioned reading habits seems imminent. Or that is what Nicholas Carr argues in his book ‘The Shallows” (7). In a well researched and cleverly presented argument, he convincingly shows how the digital era is actually changing the way our brains work, with negative consequences for careful, reflective reading. We no longer think deeply, and we don’t give our full attention to what we are reading. We want short texts (let’s say, um, 140 characters long) or ones we can easily scan: nice little chunks with clever headlines to keep us on track, and nothing that demands us to actually think. The internet is making us stupid.
So, reading is in peril. There is the evil enemy of broadcasting, the brain-blasting emptiness of computer games, and even the internet, with all its amazing text and its solid motivational drive to get us reading, all working to bring about the end of reading as we know it.
That’s all very alarming. And into this bleak desert which is the future of reading arrives Steemit: a platform for encouraging a reading community. How brazen of the community to expect reading to be something to be encouraged in a world where reading is dying. Now perhaps, is a good time to ask whether Steemit has things right? Is reading dying? Is there hope for us? What is really happening to reading?
In reality, however, the fact is that you are reading this, and hopefully so are many other people. So here, perhaps, is a case against all the negative press that reading has been getting.
In fact, if we look at all these facts about reading from another angle, a rosier picture emerges. Let’s go back in time again, and look at some of the other kinds of fear mongering literature that the art of reading gave rise to. You see, at one stage, it was reading that was the enemy, something that we had to eliminate. For example, in 1954, Fredric Wertham was clear on the terrible dangers of comic reading:
All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers (8).
Goodness! I used to read Tintin when I was a kid - I guess that explains why I turned out this way.
But we can go even further back to find out about the terrible vagaries of reading. In the mid 1800s, there was much brimstone and fire on the topic of women reading fiction. John Kellogg (yes, the cornflake guy) called reading novels “one of the most pernicious habits to which a young lady can be devoted. When the habit is once thoroughly fixed, it becomes as inveterate as the use of liquor or opium”. But let’s not blame Kellogg: this opinion was widespread. Reading was thought to lead to moral decline, reproductive failure, dishonour, and, according to Middlebrook’s New English Almanac of 1852, insanity (9). Men, apparently, were exempt from such symptoms.
Despite these attacks on reading, it caught on, even among women, and has stuck. Reading will not be kicked down by Kellogg and his league. Furthermore, it seems that reports on the death of modern reading habits are somewhat exaggerated. There is research supporting arguments that children’s reading habits have remained remarkably stable in spite of TV ownership (10). Video games aren’t killing reading, in fact, they seem to help improve children’s reading, and have been shown to help children suffering from dyslexia (11). In spite of naysayers about the effect of the internet on reading, there are reports that book sales have continued to rise (12).
To be honest, though, It’s not easy to see why reading is so popular or so durable. It is not exactly fun - in fact it’s pretty hard work. You have to set time aside for it, it has few immediate returns, and it is often cognitively taxing. Try reading James Joyce’s Ulysses for a serious cognitive attack! Reading is also very unsociable. Unlike movies, we can’t easily share what we are reading with others (without boring them to death), meaning that what we read is alive only to us. Avid readers are often labelled nerds, caricatured as brainy and dreamy (at best) or socially awkward and isolated (at worst), and booted right out of the cool-dude clubs. Quite reminiscent of the Middlebrook New English Almanac. The quiet, isolated nature of reading is perhaps one of the reasons late primary school children and teens, who are at the height of their need for social contact, find it so hard to develop a reading habit.
I remember a friend at school who read a lot. If you disturbed him while he was reading, he would emerge from his book reluctantly, always be slightly disorientated, as if he was having trouble reattaching reality to this here-and-now. We used to tease him, and he wasn’t in the super-cool dude club.
Whether they are in the super-cool dude club or not, well-read people are worthy of respect.
In spite of the cognitive challenge, the isolation, and the general slog, somehow or another reading sucks us in. We become absorbed in alternative worlds, we live other lives, we come across fascinating facts and completely useless knowledge that is intriguing. It doesn’t matter if it’s literature or nonfiction, people who read will easily enumerate a list of benefits of reading.
There’s more than our personal justifications to show that reading matters. A lot of interesting research has been done on this. Readers have larger vocabularies, show more confidence with writing, achieve better scores in educational settings, are better at maths (yup!), improves cognitive functioning, increases working memory capacity. It also affects our personality: for instance, it reduces anxiety and depression, and increases curiosity. In one study, for instance, reading fiction was shown to increase empathy (13). It makes sense: reading literature puts us in the minds of others, it forces us to see the world through the eyes of serial killers, it presents ideas in ways that are foreign to our own way of thinking. In literature where characters are ‘round’ (rather than ‘flat’, thanks to E.M Forster for this distinction 14), we make friends with people who live in different centuries, in different countries, and who have entirely different problems to our own. Anyone who has read the Stephen King Rage, for example, has had a fun but rather disturbing insight into the mind of a school shooter.
But the fact that you are reading this means that I’m preaching to the choir. You are a reader, and if you have made it to the end of this article, you have proven Nicholas Carr wrong about concentration and staying power with reading online. Is reading under threat? I think not, though there is certainly a lot to distract one from it: good movies, a thousand TV channels, reruns of George Carlin on YouTube, or the latest podcast from No Such Thing as a Fish.
Steemit isn’t tapping into a dying medium - on the contrary, it’s at the forefront of a vibrant sharing of creative talent that would otherwise dwell in the shadows. These are the voices that would never be heard. It’s possibly the beginning of a great democratizing movement that is part of the new way we read. Now more than ever, I believe, is the time to read.
1
The long steady decline of literary reading, Washington Post, September 7, 2016
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/07/the-long-steady-decline-of-literary-reading/?utm_term=.0f04e3f48846
2
Lewis is scornful of radio culture. New York Times, May 12 1936.
https://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E00E6DC1F3AE33BBC4A52DFB366838D629EDE&legacy=true
3
BELSON W. A. (1961) THE EFFECTS OF TELEVISION ON THE READING AND THE BUYING OF NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES Public Opin Q 25 (3): 366-381. https://doi.org/10.1086/267033
4
Wagner L. (1980) The Effects of TV on Reading, Journal of Reading, Vol. 24/ 3, pp. 201-206 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40031653?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
5
Weis, R and Cerankosky, B. C. (2010) Effects of Video-Game Ownership on Young Boys’ Academic and Behavioral Functioning, Psychological Science, Vol 21, Issue 4, pp. 463 - 470 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797610362670
6
Children’s reading shrinking due to apps, games and YouTube
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2013/sep/26/children-reading-less-apps-games
Carr, N. (2011). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. WW Norton & Company.
Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 1954
http://www.psu.edu/dept/inart10_110/inart10/cmbk4cca.html
9
Middlebrook’s New English Almanac of 1852
http://historybuff.com/victorian-doctors-thought-reading-novels-made-women-incurably-insane-xb70DNmzAZWk
10
Harrison, C. (2003). Understanding reading development. Sage.
11
Video games 'help reading in children with dyslexia' BBC 28 Feb 2013
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-21619592
13
Kidd, D., & Castano, E. (2016). Different Stories: How Levels of Familiarity With Literary and Genre Fiction Relate to Mentalizing. Psychology of Aesthetics Creativity and the Arts Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/aca0000069
http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/aca0000069
14
E.M. Forster, (1927) Aspects of the Novel
https://books.google.co.th/books/about/Aspects_of_the_Novel.html?id=FLS1tV-UXawC&redir_esc=y