Writelife

The writer, the reader and the worker bee

January 8th, 2005 by Bill

People don’t read anymore — at least, not as many people read as in the past and I suspect of those that do, the amount they read is reduced. And there is a good essay on this called Let’s Blame the Readers by Evan Cornog in CJR (Columbia Journalism Review). (Thanks to Writing for the Web for pointing me to this with a recent post.)

It has prompted me to babble out loud on the subject in my own post. Why aren’t people reading?

It seems to me that reading, like everything else, occurs within a context and therefore many things affect it. Making a quick category list, I came up with:

Alternatives to reading
Environment
Content of written material
Social aspects
Education

My brief take is below. Hopefully, I can expand on these at some time since each one is simply a quickly dashed off thought and far from complete (or thought through).

Alternatives to reading
The written word does not exist in isolation. It competes with electronic communication (television, the Internet etc.). I think the most important point here is that words now compete with images. We are an image obsessed culture.

Environment
Who has time to read? More to the point, who has the inclination to read in a world mad for “multi-tasking” and squeezing as much activity as possible into the waking hours (and sometimes even the non-waking ones). For me, at least, reading is meditative, at least relative to other things. It’s not a fast-paced activity and it is often difficult to slow yourself down to sit still and read.

Content of written material
I think when we discuss reading and it’s decline we often focus on what is wrong with readers (hence, Cornog’s essay title, Let’s Blame the Readers).

When we shift the focus to the writing itself, we still tend to keep this focus. We think we need to “dumb it down,” so to speak. In other words, rather than a news story about government and change, we talk about celebrities — Brad and Jen splitting, or some such thing. But “dumb it down,”or at least trivial content (another assumption), isn’t the answer. In fact, it creates entirely new problems. It’s like a quick fix that momentarily improves your situation but ultimately leaves you in a worse spot than you were in before.

Social aspects
This and education, the point below, are the real subject of Cornog’s essay and where I think a lot of the reality of the decline in reading resides. For example, as Cornog puts it, ” … over the last few decades, the public realm has shrunk, and our private worlds have grown more isolated.”

You might think isolation would lead to increased reading, but it does not. It only leads to disengagement. Our focus is now almost exclusively on the individual as opposed to the community. In part, this is a result of a constant and relentless stream of advertising messages that focus on you, you, you. Be an individual; to hell with everyone else.

But the individual isn’t really an individual, not in this culture. The individual is clearly defined — the individual is a consumer. Your purpose is to support business because business is everything. In a sense, we have rewritten the phrase â€œthe pursuit of happiness.” It now reads, “the pursuit of business.”

Education
One of the ironies of the current state of things is we’re a society of better educated uneducated people. Most people I know are constantly studying, taking new courses, improving their education. But it is restricted to their careers. Cornog writes,

According to Larry Cuban, a professor of education at Stanford University, it is “business-inspired reform coalitions” that have recast public education: â€œIn doing so, the traditional and primary collective goal of public schools building literate citizens able to engage in democratic practices” — the goal of American’s founders — “has been replaced by the goal of social efficiency, that is, preparing students for a competitive labor market anchored in a swiftly changing economy.”

As an aside, one of the things I find interesting where I work is that the people who are best informed about the world are the handful of news editors I work with and the tech guys– programmers, developers and engineers. What is it about a tech education, or the tech personality, that makes them an informed group?

And all this means

Generally, I would say a decline in reading is not in itself a problem. It could simply reflect a change in mediums. Rather than becoming informed one way, we become informed another.

But I think a decline in reading is much more than that. It reflects a disengagement and isolation that has been occurring where we are all, increasingly, simply mindless worker bees in a great and unthinking economic machine (a bit like the Matrix, I suppose). The risk is lives without meaning and, in the absence of meaning, there is, well, nothing.

Finally, I’m reminded of an old Kinks song. In the words of Ray Davies,