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From an article by Caleb Crain in the New Yorker:
Since 1982, the Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts have asked thousands of Americans questions about reading.
In 1982, 56.9 percent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous 12 months. In 2002, that number had fallen to 46.7 percent.
American households’ spending on books, adjusted for inflation, is near its twenty-year low.
Last month (November, 2007) the NEA 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, Dana Gioia, the NEA chairman, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.”
More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability.
The average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred point scale between 1992 and 2003. The proportion who were “proficient” — capable of comparing viewpoints in two editorials — declined from fifteen percent to thirteen.
Twelfth graders’ reading scores fell an average of six points between 1992 and 2005. The steepest declines were in “reading for literary experience” — the kind that involves “exploring themes, events, characters, settings, and the language of literary works”.
In 1992, 54 percent of twelfth graders said they talked about their reading with friends at least once a week. By 2005, only 37 percent said they did.
Some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy. It certainly won’t regain the old prestige it had in the 19th century: it will probably just become an increasingly arcane hobby.
Such a shift would change the texture of society. If one person decides to watch “The Sopranos” rather than to read Leonardo Sciascia’s novella “To Each His Own,” the culture goes on largely as before — both viewer and reader are entertaining themselves while learning something about the Mafia in the bargain. But if, over time, many people choose television over books, then a nation’s conversation with itself is likely to change.
A reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does; according to some experimental psychologists, a reader and a viewer even think differently.
The scholar Walter J. Ong once speculated that television and similar media are taking us into an era of “secondary orality,” akin to the primary orality that existed before the emergence of text.
A Russian study in 1974 looked at illiterate and newly literate people. It found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled.
In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue,” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.”
Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates didn’t.
Experimemters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log; they asked them to choose the three items that were similar.
Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than any conceptual category.
One peasant, informed that someone had grouped th three tools together, discarding the log, replied, “Whoever told you that must have been crazy,” and another suggested, “Probably he’s got a lot of firewood.”
One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and declared, “Now, clearly, the child doesn’t belong in this group,” only to have the peasant answer: “Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them.”
Illiterates also resisted giving definitions of words. And they refused to make logical inferences about hypothetical situations.
In the 1970’s, Walter Ong synthesized existing research to give a vivid picture of the oral mind-set. Literate people, he said, can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, but orals embed their thoughts in stories.
The best way to preserve ideas (in the absence of writing) is to “think memorable thoughts” whose zing insures their transmission.
And so in an oral culture, cliche and stereotype are valued as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such thing as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument.
There is research suggesting that secondary orality and literacy don’t mix. In a study published in 2007 experimenters varied the way that people took in a PowerPoint presentation about “the country of Mali”.
Those who were allowed to read silently were more likely to agree with the statement “The presentation was interesting.” Those who read along with an audiovisual presentation were more likely to agree with “I did not learn anything from this presentation.”
The silent readers remembered more, too — a finding in line with a series of British studies in which people who only read transcripts of television newscasts, political programs, advertisements, and science shows recalled more information than those who had watched the shows themselves.
If the change away from reading is permanent, and especially if the slide to television and streaming media continues, the world will feel different, even to those who still read.
Because the change has been happening slowly for decades, everyone has a sense of what is at stake, though it is rarely put into words. …Streaming media give actual pictures and sounds instead of mere descriptions of them…
Moving and talking images are much richer in information about a performer’s appearance, manner, and tone of voice, and they give us the impression that we know more about her health and mood, too.
The act of reading allows us to think, and judge. Maryanne Wolf, in her book “Proust and the Squid,” explains that once a person is a “fluent” reader, less of the brain is required to negotiate the text, freeing up the rest for deeper thought.
As Marshall McLuhan said in 1967, “Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium.” The viewer identifies in a more total way, and responds emotionally to the story, the speaker, the candidate.
Emotional responsiveness to streaming media harks back to the world of primary orality. The experience amounts to a kind of possession (Plato). The viewer feels at home with his show, or else he changes the channel.
The closeness to sight and sensory information makes it hard to negotiate differences of opinion.
There is nothing like this connection with print. A feeling for a “writer” never touches the fact of the Writer herself, unless reader and writer happen to meet.
While it may be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, it is almost unbearable to watch such a TV show.
And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with. Self-doubt becomes less likely. In fact, doubt of any kind is rarer.
It is easy to notice inconsistencies in two written accounts placed side by side.
With text, it is even easy to keep track of different levels of authority behind different pieces of information. The trust a reader puts in a newspaper story may vary sentence by sentence.
Two differing video reports, however, are cumbersome to compare.
Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching. Like the Russian peasants, he thinks in terms of situations and story lines rather than abstractions.
And he may have even more trouble than [the] peasants in seeing himself as others do. After all, there is no one looking back at the television viewer. He is alone, though he, and his brain, my be too distracted to notice it.
The reader is also alone, but the NEA reports that readers are more likely than non-readers to play sports, exercise, visit art museums, attend theater, paint, go to music events, take photographs, and volunteer. Proficient readers are also more likely to vote.
Proust wrote that no matter how much one worships an author, all the author can do “is give us desires.”
Apparently, somehow, that writer can give us the boldness to act on those desires.
sole source: New Yorker article by Caleb Crain in the December 24 and 31 issue. www.newyorker.com. Read this entire article: there is much more to be found there, including information derived from Maryanne Wolf’s book on reading and the brain, “Proust and The Squid.” Caleb Crain is a writer of criticism and fiction. His novella, “Sweet Grafton” was published in December 2007 in the journal “n+1″.
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