bad reading
Among our cultural critics there is now, and will continue to be for many years, much anxiety about the reading habits of the American public. (See this recent New Yorker essay by Caleb Crain for the worries and the research that supports them.) The primary concern is that we’re not reading enough books, which is certainly a legitimate issue — at least for people like me who write books and would like people to read them. (Or at least buy them.) What no one seems to understanding clearly is how much more or less reading in general people are doing now, as compared to, say, twenty years ago. The internet is of course the puzzle: for all the Flickr photos and YouTube videos and iTunes tracks out there, there are also one hell of a lot of words, and a hell of a lot of people reading them.
Or at least kind of reading them. I don’t think that the internet makes reading skills worse — in fact, as Crain reports, there are studies indicating a positive correlation between internet use and academic performance — but I think the internet does help us to understand just how poorly many people read. The key, I think, is that when we’re surfing the web we are in such close proximity to the tools of writing.
Think about it: when you’re reading a book or magazine and you want to comment on it, you have to find a pen or pencil, grip the book awkwardly, and scribble something in the margin, or on the inside of the cover, that you probably won’t be able to read later anyway. Or you have to set the book or magazine down and find yourself something to write on. Often this proves to be too much trouble, and your comment goes unmade, or put off until later, when second thoughts may well kick in. But when you’re reading something online, the opportunity to respond to it is quite literally at your fingertips. And if you do that, people can learn something about how well, or how carelessly, you read.
I can only speak personally and anecdotally here, but it’s continually surprising to me how often people commenting on online articles or blog posts respond to something the author never said — in some cases never even came close to saying. People gather an impression from their reading, and then formulate a response based on that impression — but how often do they pause to test that impression, to re-read to discover whether the impression was right? (Also, how often do commenters who have been corrected on their false impressions come back and acknowledge that they were wrong?)
Some people will of course say that the internet is to blame for these bad habits, but as a teacher of literature who has been giving reading quizzes to students — and by all standard measures exceptionally good students — since Reihan was in diapers, I doubt that. People have trouble reading carefully even when they have multiples incentives to read carefully. I think the internet reveals people’s reading habits, and if someone wants to get beyond simple complaints about poor reading and truly to understand the particular ways in which readers go astray, there is an enormous wealth of information out there just waiting for someone to collect, collate, and interpret it.
Alan, I’m only responding to an impression of what I’ve just read, but: you have to keep in mind that I am currently wearing a diaper, which leads me to conclude that you haven’t in fact starting giving reading quizzes to students. I strongly encourage you to start, as I find this diaper exceptionally uncomfortable.
For the record, I am not in fact wearing a diaper. The fact that I feel the need to point this out explicitly is a sad commentary on the state of the blogosphere.
— Reihan · Dec 29, 06:58 PM · #
Before the internet, everyone just knew whether brown men were wearing diapers or not. Now it’s nothing but confusion. Nothing. But. Confusion.
— Alan Jacobs · Dec 29, 07:19 PM · #
Alan, you’re obviously just an old fogey who’s been sheltered in your academic high tower for too long and who refuses to recognize the importance of the internet to cultural advancement. If you weren’t so in love with Gutenberg’s legacy, you’d realize that RSS feeds are a far more efficient way of delivering information than books ever were, or could be. And YouTube too.
— Peter Suderman · Dec 29, 09:50 PM · #
Peter, how wrong you are. I embody in myself the Higher Reconciliation of the Gutenbergian and the post-Guterbergian; I am large, I contain multitudes. Remember: I am the one who called the Scene’s attention to Teh Holiez Bibul.
— Alan Jacobs · Dec 29, 10:24 PM · #
I was going to say that anyone who quotes Whitman about lolcats deserves a cigar, but you’re an English teacher, that’s cheating.
Anyway, yes, people are rude, people don’t read, but the internet isn’t to blame. People have been rude and illiterate since the dawn of time, and will always be so. If anything the internet IMPROVES things (at least on the literacy side).
I’m not sure if that relates to anything you were saying, but it felt good to say it based on my impression of what you said.
— PEG · Dec 30, 01:50 AM · #
Although I am not—for the moment—in diapers and am endeavouring to not be rude, I wonder whether it’s quite enough to say with Alan Jacobs that the internet merely reveals how people read. This would seem to assume that the medium through which we read changes nothing about reading itself. Even a cursory glance at the history of reading would suggest this isn’t the case. Widely available books and increasing literacy didn’t only make reading more prevalent; they changed the kind of reading that went on and made new and different kinds of reading possible.
I think we’re in a similar moment now, but I find the typical narratives associated with this change dissatisfying. On the one hand the apocalyptic turn profferred by Doris Lessing, John Updike, and others is overly nostalgic about everything that books have done for us while at the same time refusing to recognize real possibilities in digital communications. On the other hand, I think digital utopians tend to think any change provoked by technology heralds the new heavens and the new earth.
A lot of studies are indicating not simply that young Americans are reading fewer books but also that they can hardly make sense of ten page essays when they graduate from college. A recent study suggests that students don’t like reading e-mail anymore because it is usually too long and ponderous! I think this suggests that it’s not enough to note that people are “reading” more now, albeit through a different delivery system. Rather, reading is not one thing but many things. We need more precise discussions of what kinds of reading are falling in to disuse, what kinds are being employed, and what the consequences of those changes might be.
I’m not yet persuaded by the view that this is merely culturally different—a passing of the torch to a new generation, so to speak— and doesn’t represent some kind of real human loss associated with the inability to give attention, to attend, which is related to the ability to care.
Interestingly, I find, anecdotally, an increasing number of students in my English department who say they don’t really like to read, but they really do like to write. The study of literature in the academy is in its death throes while, bizarrely, creative writing programs grow exponentially. I don’t think all of this can be laid at the doorstep of the house of theory. We really have entered a period where pretty much everyone is interested in writing, but no one really cares very much to read, or at least not to read anything for a purpose other than the opportunity to write.
Now time to change my diapers.
— Pete Powers · Dec 30, 02:46 AM · #
Thanks for the good thoughts, Pete – I hope to respond in more detail later.
— Alan Jacobs · Dec 30, 03:37 PM · #
The phenomenon of the English major who doesn’t like to read has always perplexed me. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the study of literature is in its death throws, or at least, its no more accurate to say it now than it was to say it ten years ago or fifteen or twenty-five or fifty. Like “there’s so much crime” and “there’s so much drugs” and “kids are so crazy now, “nobody reads anymore” is one of those complaints that people feel free to make at any time period, in any context.
More later, I hope.
— Freddie · Dec 30, 07:09 PM · #
Whether the study of literature is really in its death throes or not is, I admit, debatable. But I base the comment—however histrionic and anxiety-ridden—on some fairly consistent statistical developments in surveys by the MLA. Overall the number of English majors nationwide has held relatively steady, but they represent a smaller and smaller percentage of college graduates. That is, as the number of people going to college has increased, the number of people choosing to major in English has not increased.
Interestingly, this mirrors the statistics developed by the NEA—themselves much debated, I realize—that indicate that the number of book readers in the United States has remained roughly static, a fact which results in a smaller and smaller percentage of book readers as the population increases. The statistics also suggest we are not replacing the book readers of the older end of the baby boom generation with book readers in our current college age and twenty something generation. As many others have pointed out, including Alan Jacobs above, it may be that these folks are doing a good deal of reading; they aren’t, however, doing it in the traditional textual long forms and the associated intensive reading styles usually associated with the study of literature.
An associated trend in English studies is the fact that an increasing percentage of English majors are actually studying professional and creative writing. That is, fewer and fewer are studying (“reading”) literature as a primary area of interest. Combined with the ascendancy of cultural studies approaches in even undergraduate programs, I do think it’s fair to say that the study of literature has been in a period of decline for a while now, a trend that is quite likely to accelerate over the next decade. A recent essay in PROFESSION suggested that there are tremendous differences in preferences for cognitive multi-tasking between even 18 year olds and 12 year olds—suggesting, though not proving, that the cognitive abilities necessary for sustaining literary studies are fast diminishing.
I doubt literary studies will disappear before I retire in 20 some-odd years, but if I were an administrator looking at some of these issues, I think I would put my bets on English departments becoming something more like rhetoric and philology departments with literary studies being absorbed into the study of rhetoric and language on the one hand and into broad and vaguely defined cultural studies or humanities programs on the other.
Whether this is important or not is hard to say. The world got along fine for millennia without literary studies. On the other hand, the more general question of whether a broad-based democracy can sustain itself effectively when the average citizen can’t read and understand modestly-sized texts may be a question of some deeper concern. I tend to think that if the discipline emphasized the fairly modest claim that we can make citizens more effective readers, we might actually be in a better position to defend our importance to the world at large than either old-style arguments that literature made people better human beings or new style arguments that literary study is at the forefront of the world historical revolution. Both, in their own ways, too grandiose to be plausible.
— Pete Powers · Dec 30, 08:12 PM · #
Is that a diaper or have you been smuggling rare books out of the Library of Congress AGAIN?
— Joules · Dec 31, 03:10 AM · #
One way to think about these matters, Pete, is to argue that the dramatic increase in college attendance — especially in this country, and especially since WWII and the G. I. Bill — over historic levels has inflated our expectations for literary reading, and inflated them to unreasonable levels. We may well have been due for a kind of correction, which the presence of electronic short-form texts helps to provide. Milton’s idea of a “fit audience, though few” may once again need to be literature’s watchword — though there are other forces at work. Just think about how many hundreds of thousands of people in the past few years have read Faulkner, Garcia Marquez and Tolstoy because of Oprah’s Book Club. Perhaps a phenomenon like that can’t and won’t be repeated for a younger generation, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that something of the kind could happen, though perhaps in a different form and via different media. (You can tell from my comments, I suppose, that what I think really matters is the number of actual readers in the culture, not the number of English majors or formal students of literature.)
The other chief question you raise is more complex and potentially troubling: is the kind of sustained and long-term attentiveness that literary reading requires also required for serious participation in the public sphere? I don’t know the answer to that, but will think about it.
— Alan Jacobs · Dec 31, 03:40 PM · #
Thanks for the reply, Alan. And thanks, too, for letting me take up more than my space on this page. If it’s not already obvious I’m trying to work out a book idea on these issues (so old-fashioned, I realize. A book, that is). Only one more.
I agree that the more difficult question is the relationship between forms of reading, responsible citizenship, and effective democratic institutions. I’m not sure that I agree with the digital utopians who insist that the internet signals the birth of new mass, and informed, democratic participation. The internet is many things, and some of it is arguably anti-democratic. It can be a very effective purveyor of misinformation as much and often moreso than of effective inquiry or political clarity. (“Information”: another vague term I don’t like—as if transmitted kilobytes are the same thing as effective communication).
On the other hand, I don’t think the simple fact of reading books makes democracy possible. But I do think the decline of intensive forms of reading—usually associated with longer textual forms—may be a cause for concern. A lot of what passes for “reading” on the net is the consumption of textual “soundbites.” In such a culture, I think it is no accident that the one thing that people can quote from Martin Luther King Jr. is “I have a dream.” Forget his sermons; this is about the text length that most people can stand, or comprehend.
I agree that as far as literature itself is concerned that Milton’s dictum may hold sway; indeed, I think it already does. However, unlike Milton’s age, I think being one of the “few” these days purchases very little cultural capital. I’ve been toying with the idea that literary readers should be considered part of a subculture—albeit one that has several tens of millions of hard core participants world-wide and perhaps another couple of hundred million hangers-on. These latter the equivalent of my fellow episcopalians who come to church on Christmas and Easter.
One last word, re. the Oprah. My own cynical take is that books are increasingly like fruitcakes. They are bought primary at Christmas, primarily given to other people, and then re-gifted without being consumed.
Ok, I’ll stop. I promise. It’s obvious that I lead a sequestered and unfortunate existence since I’m up writing this post on New Years Eve rather than settling in with my champagne, cheese, and crackers.
Pete
— Pete Powers · Jan 1, 02:51 AM · #