Twilight of the Books

[altivo]

Caleb Crain visits the subject of literacy and its decline, in America and the rest of the world, in this week's New Yorker:

Twilight of the Books

"The results, first reported by the N.E.A. in 2004, are dispiriting. In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, 'Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.'”

Crain goes on to discuss the changes in culture and society that anthropologists and historians associate with the rise of widespread literacy, and speculates on the implications of the current decline if it continues.

Comments

[animist.livejournal.com]

No surprise to me; look who we Americans elect. The corporate masters want us fat, dumb, and happy - and obedient.

[rigelkitty.livejournal.com]

What's the definition of "creative literature" that's required reading for contributing to literacy? Does LiveJournal count? A newspaper? An online newspaper? Graphic novels? A 400pg collection of Charles Schulz's 1950's "Peanuts" strips?

If I read every Stephen King and Clive Barker novel to the exclusion of other great works, would I be literate or illiterate?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, and though Crain only hints at it, that's clearly the point of his essay. He is referencing several studies that show that people who don't read, or who read poorly, think and reason in different ways from those who do read fluently. Carried to the logical extreme, this trend could be an indication of a new "dark ages" coming upon the human race. It has been argued before that though reading was a skill practiced mostly by upper class elite in Greece and Rome, since their rule was by hegemony and oligarchy (even the fabled democracy of Athens was really limited to a small minority of the residents) those cultures were influenced in a positive direction that was lost when educational systems and values collapsed, leading to the Dark Ages and Medieval feudalism. The Renaissance was a dawn of revaluing education and literacy, which peaked in the first half of the 20th century and appears to be in decline again.

He also echoes something I've been thinking as I watch the internet phenomenon. At first, the internet perforce encouraged literacy, because the written word was the primary medium of communication. The internet made the process faster and leveled the playing field, but you still had to read and write. Now the bulk of internet bandwidth is being used by graphics and video, and highly graphical "networking" sites like facebook and myspace. Is that significant? I feel it is, and in a very negative way. Voters who are stimulated by youtube are no different in the end from voters who are stimulated by television sound bites.

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

I find folk pedantic when it comes to polls about literacy and reading - they argue the toss about just what construes reading when they know in their hearts exactly what is meant. It means reading a book with words in, from start to finish and gaining a certain degree of comprehension about what one has just read.

"Does it mean looking at comics" - NO - it means reading a book of text that may or may not have diagrams, etchings, maps and illustrations in.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

If you go beyond Crain to his primary sources, the definition of "literacy" and "literary reading" is laid out in detail. Newspapers, assuming they are of better quality than the tabloids, certainly count. So would publications that consist largely of news and news commentary, regardless of their political bent, so the National Review and Commonweal or even Utne Reader would count, as would Time, Newsweek or U.S. News.

"Literary reading" is taken as a useful measuring stick, rather than as an end unto itself. There is an assumption that people who read literature (which would not include comics or graphic novels to any extent, I'm afraid) also read other sources, such as newspapers, magazines, and non-fiction commentary. You're right that reading only Stephen King and Laurell K. Hamilton isn't going to make you an informed or discerning voter, but my observation as a librarian suggests that the majority of people who do read better quality novels do also read newspapers and magazines. There are always exceptions of course.

The base hypothesis is that the brain processing required to read written language does in fact shape rational thought, while mere visual stimulation by images or auditory stimulation by speech is not as specific or effective.

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

I presume you will also mean the loss of a coherent language that has been hacked to pieces by chatrooms and SMS.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, and as Crain states in this article, video games and internet usage alone do not equate. While the internet did provide stimulation in the form of written words primarily some 15 years ago, that has shifted so that many (probably most I fear) users today are only looking at video and listening to sound, with the words having become secondary or even nonexistent to them.

It goes back once again to Marshall McLuhan's definitions of "cool" vs. "warm" media. The cool media of television, film, graphics, etc. do not provide sufficient mental input or stimulus to spur on rational thought on their own.

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

how can individuals blame non-reading on the leader of a country where books are free and freely available in libraries?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'd say that is symptomatic rather than causative.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Bush's re-election is symptomatic rather than causative in that argument. I should point out that books are not "free" here, unfortunately. Some states, including my own, do not have a universal library service policy. If you live in an area served by a free public library you have books available for free (well, not really free, since you pay for it in taxes) but if you live outside such service areas you cannot obtain public library services without paying a fee. In Illinois this fee averages about $10 per month for a household with any number of occupants, which is roughly equivalent to the average tax paid by property owners in library service districts. Ten dollars a month is not a huge amount, but it is not negligible either, and is exacerbated by the fact that state law requires that it be paid in one year terms. So a library card can cost $120 up front, which is certainly not negligible nor is it easy for many people to pay.

Of course it is also true that households that complain to me about this cost being too high and unfair usually are spending $50 or more a month for television services, and consider that an essential cost even though they can still receive a certain amount of television out of the air without charge.

Nor, alas, is the content free in the sense of being uncensored. More and more heavy biases and pressures are being brought to bear on the content of library books and school books.

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

And as one last *zing* into the debate I shall finish up with this

Reading: what's not to like? - beats an eye full of TV hands down

goodnight to each and everyone
:O)

swirling down to gruntitude

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

when one comes across books written in that mode it is degenerative and soon we will be back to uttering and writing mere grunts , which is where we came in all those thousands of years ago is it not?

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

Of course you small last sentence is the most worrying factor - and where I (perhaps with a little wry smile) try to ignite a good discussion with the comment you now reply to, the atmosphere changes into a far more disconcerting air. This IS what you can call your leader down for; indeed one should actively seek his disembowellment, impeachment removal just for this reason alone.

Hmmm - has anyone donated a copy of Fahrenheit 451 to his ipod?

Re: swirling down to gruntitude

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh, I certainly agree with you here. :)

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

and as a bye-the-bye - I am no where near a library and I pay for each and every book I read (except for the audio downloads of course *dry short cough*) because not reading would equate to utter misery. I take my monthly salary from bonnie_tiler in this form. I could not bear to take bookeeping pay in the form of coins of the realm as it would leave me feeling tawdry in a red-satin-mini-skirt sort of way and it may mean that I look on him as an ample hooked nose demanding a pound of flesh whilst peering over the Ponte dei Sospiri

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I honestly think that works like Bradbury's are lost entirely on people who seek censorship. Bush is not particularly an advocate of outright censorship, but... his administration promotes an environment in which censorship can more easily flourish. Some of his supporters, particularly those on the religious right, do favor censorship particularly of school books and curricula.

Re: swirling down to gruntitude

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

there is something about a discussion in your pages that leaves me with a feeling of a 'judi dench' similitude

warm laughs and hugs to altivo

Re: swirling down to gruntitude

[altivo.livejournal.com]

To bed with you, wise lady. The hour is late. ;D

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

I just cannot see it at all.

I saw 451 on a list that should be banned - how ironical can it be?

Pssst - BTW - which part of which book would you entrust to memory to pass on to the fledglings?

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

I thought he WAS the harsh religious right - you mean there are more of a crueller nature?

Re: swirling down to gruntitude

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

dismissed

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Probably I'd choose some piece of Shakespeare, or else Jonathan Swift. But I also agree with what Crain says in his article about the effect on a culture of having to carry its cultural memory verbally rather than in writing. It is devastating.

In reality, I'd end up like the librarian in Bradbury's book, the one who was burned up along with her illegal collection of printed volumes.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Absolutely there are much more cruel and right-leaning demagogues than George W. He's pretty wishy washy when left to his own devices, and probably even ineffectual in many respects. Among the religious right we have people like Pat Robertson and Mike Huckabee, who would like to impose much more draconian restrictions on personal and religious freedom than anything proposed by the Bush administration.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

You might not like this, but I just realised that although I have three bookcases here, there are only two books on the shelves between them. I use shelving exclusively for storing miscellaneous items, plushies, and various projects. I have lots of books, but I keep them in boxes because I don't use them as much as I use other things.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Shelves may be used to store anything. I have no objection to that. Nor is book ownership anything other than one possible indicator among many. I have seen enough of you to know that you are literate, rational, and thoughtful.

What you could say that would at least slightly disappoint me is that you don't read anything unlessed forced to do so. If that were true though, you wouldn't be reading my journal. ;p (And I know that in order to attain your level of education, you had to read and write plenty...)

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

There's also this, which might be a chicken-vs.-egg conundrum: Publishers seem more and more inclined to create books, particularly non-fiction, instructional texts, that are so broken up into pieces, visually -- charts, graphs, sidebars, pull-quotes in the margins.... school textbooks are terribly cluttered things that I don't know how anyone reads. The argument is that this is how kids grasp the information better, but I don't see how a kid comes away with anything besides a collection of facts that they can't weave into a body of knowledge. Now, are textbooks this way because kids can't understand things presented in "the old style," or are publishers misinterpreting the effects of music videos, video games, and the like?

And it's not just 7th grade science textbooks -- it seems like most reading material for any age, besides fiction, is set up in the visual equivalent of sound bites. Publishers, like television news, seem determined to give us what they think we want, not what we actually need.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I've wondered from time to time whether anyone else was noticing that. I do think it's drawn from the immense popularity of short attention span television and constitutes a desperate attempt by the leading print media to retain audience.

However, the disease has not penetrated all that far into mainstream adult materials (yet.) The column I cited here is a good example of that, even though it does have advertisements sprayed all around the edges and typical New Yorker cartoons interrupting it.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

New Yorker articles do look worse on screen than in print. New Yorker articles are long, and the web really isn't all that conducive to one long scrolling page. Plus, there's a lot more advertising per page than in the typical print version page.

I think there's a real problem when "authorities" (teachers, publishers, media producers) give in and chop the materials into spoon-size bits. It'll get to the point where people can't pay attention to something that requires longer explanations and thought. Granted, a lot of the development of the worlds' great innovations was done by people who "didn't have no book learnin'," but ... still...

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Oh, I've definitely chosen to read books and other things of my own volition. The difference between being forced to read and being motivated to read a book (or to write) is as big as day and night - I don't think I actually got anything out of any of the books I was forced to read for English class.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oddly perhaps, I got a lot out of the stuff I read in English class. I suppose it might be a product of the teacher or the environment, or the fact that I was already genuinely interested in literature and poetry.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid we are already at a point, like so many things in our society, where a couple of generations have passed since very many people understood these issues. Consequently, parents, school boards, and politicians "don't get it."

The result is garbage like "No Child Left Behind" which is really just "Every Child Held Back to the Lowest Common Denominator" and a high school diploma no longer means that you can read, write, or do arithmetic. Couch potato parents are horrified that their children have "too much homework" and demand that school be dumbed down even further. Politicians who barely got through school with passing grades but are clever schmoozers and have a winning smile tell us that everything will be all right and we just need to protect the kids' self-esteem. Never mind that they still can't spell their own names by the time they get to eighth grade.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Your cynicism is the typical response for someone a fair amount younger than you are. However, my actual field observations tend to confirm the conclusions of the research cited in the article.

Short term reading of brief items does not result in the same brain activity on brain scans. Even after years of similar processing, the pattern doesn't change. There does appear to be a correlation between higher levels of reading practice and different kinds of reasoning. Several studies have confirmed this, and so far I've seen none that have gone the other way.

The crucial statement you make here suggests that, for whatever reason, you have never completely broken through the processing barrier that is being discussed in the latter pages of the article. That's not a value judgement on you, in fact it puts you among a growing percentage of the population. Unfortunately we can't send a brain scan machine back to say 1900 (or 1300) to do a representative sampling of the population, nor can we send a trained team of psychologists and educators to do a study. The concepts were not known at that time, so we have to try to predict the historical changes based on what correlations we can find.

In any case, I largely agree with Crain, as you probably could tell. I do not believe that reading Wikipedia is equivalent in terms of brain exercise and development to reading an article in, say, Scientific American, even if you read through both articles from beginning to end. Skimming for facts to answer a specific question is definitely not the same, regardless of the source.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh, and most unfortunately, printed newspapers and journals are still not redundant with the internet because internet news coverage is almost invariably extremely short and terse, with neither detail nor analysis. The internet news services are often mere abstracts of the coverage you'd get in print even today.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, I don't like the sound of that, I even read books in electronic format now, but I still read.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I agree, it's pretty scary. Of course, there are those who deny that it's happening or that it matters, just as with global warming.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Beat them till they read!! Beat them all!!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Reading is like water. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Well you can feed him salt licks until he feels very thirsty then as he's at the water he'll gulp away :D

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Works with some horses. But consider that two of mine are half brothers, born the same year to different mothers. One of them will eat all the salt he can get, and drink (and pee) accordingly. The other generally ignores both the salt and the water. He consumes both very sparingly.