The death of reading (again)

Every 3 or 4 years, some pointy-head likes to bemoan the death of reading and literacy in general. As a pointy-head myself, I have done enough research to know that these sorts of complaints have been going on for literally hundreds of years. I have a great quote from Harvard professor James Jay Greenough in an 1893 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, in which he laments that the "postal card and the type-writer are eroding the art of letter writing." Beautiful.

Actually, with the advent of the Internet, people are reading and writing more than they ever have before in the history of human civilization. Whether they are doing it well or correctly is not the point. Yet this week one of my colleagues forwarded us yet another article (by Caleb Crain of The New Yorker) about how we're all going to hell in a handbasket, literacy-wise. Below is my abbreviated response (I took out much of the posturing):

I am automatically suspicious of any equation of textual literacy with intelligence and logical thinking, which seems to me frought with the troubling assumption that nonliterate/preliterate people and societies are incapable of rational thought, that they cannot absorb complexities or spot contradictions, etc.

The “death” of any medium often simply means its metamorphosis into another form, which we can choose see as a beautiful thing. Perceptions of death and decline are also very subject to manipulation, as we know: I objected at the time to the NEA report’s narrow definition of “reading” as “reading creative literature,” and I object to it now. Personally I find it kind of neat and inspiring that nonfiction reading is booming, that the 9/11 commission report was a national bestseller. I think we need to be very careful about jumping to these kind of the-sky-is-falling conclusions when faced with suggestions that people are not reading what (and how ) we think they should be reading.

Print is definitely declining, and cost is probably the biggest factor in this. But Crain’s article seems to exploit longstanding popular fears about the “decline” of reading = the decline of civilization. (Note the negative construction of his data: reading levels and time are “declining,” “falling,” “shrinking,” etc. He does not “celebrate” the “growth” of literacy in other media, audial or visual or virtual or what have you. You’d think that, if we’re not reading, we must be sitting around in caves scratching ourselves.)

A hundred years ago, novels were considered brain-rotting trash, and any truly worthwhile humanitarian would be reading philosophy or the classics in his/her free time. Nowadays it is fashionable to disparage television/the internet/texting/video games (Crain himself uses The Sopranos as his example of plebian entertainment), and elevate novel-reading to the highest level of mental, intellectual, and emotional sophistication. I’m sorry, but, reader/writer/teacher/scholar that I am I remain skeptical.

[He also says some stuff about Walter J. Ong's research about orality and literacy, which I find off-base. Normal people will find it boring, though, so I'm skipping it here.]

But I find Crain’s entire approach suspect. Statements like “The Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy” are very puzzling – isn’t the Internet itself the ultimate literacy tool? I worry that Crain has taken the all-too-popular fearmongering view, combined with an unhealthy does of self-congratulation: we who read literature for pleasure are so much better and smarter and more evolved than those who don’t. (He ends his article with nothing less than a dire prediction of the end of democracy!)

As a teacher and scholar of literacy, I am much more interested (as I think we all are) in how to achieve a marriage of the various kinds of orality and literacy - a marriage which is rooted in what our students are actually doing now and what they will be expected to do in the future - than in figuring out who or what to blame.


So I sent that to my department. We'll see if they fire me. :)