Steven Johnson on reading
Steven Johnson — whose work in general I like very much, especially Emergence and Mind Wide Open — has written a really annoying essay in the Guardian in response to the recent NEA report on reading in America. (That sentence got enough links for ya?)
Johnson’s essay was almost bound to be annoying because he’s got a such a prominent dog in this fight, his 2005 book Everything Bad Is Good For You, which addresses all earlier concerns about how various electronic media are ruining the minds of our youth by dismissing them. I exaggerate, but not much. Look, Johnson is absolutely right that a lot of silly hand-wringing goes on (as it has always gone on) about the moral, spiritual, social, and/or intellectual malaise of “young people today”; and he helpfully shows that when we do have significant and reliable data about these matters — which is not often — that data doesn’t usually support the hand-wringing.
But he’s also a little too skillful at changing subjects when the data creates discomfort for his favorite theses and claims. And that’s what makes this particular essay annoying. I’m tempted to fisk the whole thing, but I think I can get at what bothers me by quoting the last two paragraphs:
. . . thus far, when you look at the demographic patterns of the Google generation, there is not only no cause for alarm: in fact, there's genuine cause for celebration. The twentysomethings in the US - the ones who spent their childhood years engaged with computers and not zoning out in front of the TV - are the least violent, the most politically engaged and the most entrepreneurial since the dawn of the television era.
But if you listen to the NEA, we are perched on the edge of a general meltdown: "The general decline in reading is not merely a cultural issue, though it has enormous consequences for literature and the other arts. It is a serious national problem." A serious national problem with no apparent data to support it. Perhaps the scholars at the NEA should put down their novels and take some statistics classes?
Well, actually, there’s a good bit of data that Johnson simply ignores. I haven’t had time yet to look deeply enough to find whether it’s good data, but the current NEA study and others claim that long-form literary reading in particular (e.g., of novels, works of history, biographies) is correlated with various goods, including “volunteering, attending sports or cultural events, and exercising.” I don’t understand the correlation, but Johnson should probably at least mention the finding. Or maybe he thinks it insignificant: Hey, many members of the “Google generation” may be fat, unhealthy, isolated, and indifferent to local needs, but they comment a lot on the Daily Kos and they make buckets of money!
I’m not sure whether I’m kidding or not. Elsewhere in the essay Johnson writes, “I challenge the NEA to track the economic status of obsessive novel readers and obsessive computer programmers over the next 10 years. Which group will have more professional success in this climate? Which group is more likely to found the next Google or Facebook? Which group is more likely to go from college into a job paying $80,000?” This is just crass. Does Johnson really think that income is the only significant indicator of quality of life? If not, it would be helpful if he mentioned some other values.
The closest he comes to acknowledging that this issue may be complex is when he writes, “Yes, we are reading in smaller bites on the screen, often switching back and forth between applications as we do it” — In other words, yes, long-form reading is on the decline. Johnson quickly moves on to say that “There have been almost no studies that have looked at the potential positive impact of electronic media,” which is true, as far as I know — but are there studies (serious studies, I mean, not hand-wringing editorials) suggesting potential problems arising from small-bite app-switching reading? Odd that Johnson doesn’t even ask the question, since presumably he’s aware of the research that Walter Kirn discussed in his recent essay on multitasking and its discontents.
What does it to do our brains to engage in long periods of reading a single text, to try to keep in mind the arc of a narrative that runs hundreds of pages? What kind of neurological work do we do as we strive to keep track of the details that add up to such a large story? Do people who are habituated to such a discipline experience benefits elsewhere in their lives? Are there other kinds of things that they can better concentrate on, like long quiet movies, or symphonies, or extended jazz improvisations? If you read long, complex stories about ordinary human lives, do you become more attentive and sympathetic to the lives of people you meet? (Or, maybe, less so?) If you don’t do this kind of long-form reading, do you miss out on any useful intellectual, or moral, development?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, though I sure wish I did. But Steven Johnson’s essay doesn’t move me one inch closer to such answers. This is what happens when a newspaper asks someone to evaluate work that he or she has an explicit and long-standing interest in refuting. I suspect that the NEA report has some significant problems, and that it’s based on a somewhat romanticized notion of the Good Old Days of reading, but Steven Johnson’s not the guy I would turn to to get the straight dope on the matter.
“I challenge the NEA to track the economic status of obsessive novel readers and obsessive computer programmers over the next 10 years. Which group will have more professional success in this climate? Which group is more likely to found the next Google or Facebook? Which group is more likely to go from college into a job paying $80,000?”
Boy.
One thing that the average “literary reader” probably believes is that these are very poor criteria for judging whether a particular life is a success or not. I begrudge no one his or her right to define personal success in entirely materialistic terms. But what Johnson doesn’t seem to realize is that by so breezily dismissing notions of success that aren’t tied to the accumulation of wealth, he’s demonstrating precisely the kind of spiritual death that many of us associate with the end of literary reading. Someone who reads Chesterton and Wodehouse and Saramago and Flaubert, I’m willing to guess, has a vision of a more generously fulfilled life— fulfilled spiritually, aesthetically, ethically, artistically.
But, hey, Lost has more distinct plot lines than Gunsmoke. So there’s that.
— Freddie · Feb 8, 03:06 AM · #
The line about Facebook and Google being founded by computer programmers is is such a perfect strawman that I’m tempted to think you made it up. And yet when I click through it’s there.
— Justin · Feb 8, 04:41 AM · #
The “Reading at Risk” study is based on the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, which I have analyzed fairly extensively. You can read about and download the data at this address
http://www.cpanda.org/cpanda/getDDIsummary.xq?studyID=a00080
If you know what you’re doing, you can download the data and analyze it or do a few crude analyses (cross-tabs, etc) directly on the website.
One problem with Johnson’s “challenge” is that re-interviewing the same people a few years later is an order of magnitude harder than recruiting a fresh batch of people so what he is asking is non-trivial for an agency with a small budget.
FWIW, rumor has it that the NEA will be doing another survey wave soon, with the data to be released in about a year.
— Gabriel · Feb 8, 02:45 PM · #
Nice Post, Alan. You’ve saved me from having to do my own post on Johnson’s essay. I think we’re handicapped in our current cultural discussions about reading by two things. First, there seems to be no ground from which to admit complexity. Folks like Johnson, whom I call digital utopians, respond somewhat like Dr. Pangloss in Candide. It’s the Best of All Possible Worlds!! For others, and I think the NEA is a little too much this way, the sky is definitively falling if it hasn’t fallen already.
The second problem is that we have only one word, “reading,” to cover a host of cultural activities. Thus, the decline of long-form reading can be dismissed by digital utopians because people are supposedly reading on the web. Book lovers and other proponents of long-form reading—soon to be known as luddites in our culture—tend to think surfing the web can’t count for reading at all. Instead, as you suggest, we need to be asking what kinds of human gains and losses are entailed in creating a culture in which reading is primarily an occasion for writing responses like this one. A very different kind of cultural activity than reading a Tolstoy or Dickens or Toni Morrison, where, upon closing the book, I sometimes feel it is inappropriate to speak.
— Peter Kerry Powers · Feb 9, 11:43 AM · #
A belated thanks to all for the comments, and Gabriel, thanks much for that link. Interesting stuff.
— Alan Jacobs · Feb 11, 05:16 PM · #
Hey Alan, thanks for the kind words about my earlier books. A couple of responses about the annoyingness of the Guardian piece.
First, I really think you have to see the piece is being pretty much exclusively focused on dismantling the NEA study. It’s not a long meditation on the potential costs and benefits of society shifting from page to screen; it’s designed simply to point out that this one very prominent report was absurd on multiple fronts. I think there is a need for both essays, and maybe I could write the long meditation one day, but this isn’t it.
I did have a middle graph that got cut without anyone telling me that tried to signal that this was a complicated issue, and not black and white. It read:
“Yes, we are reading in smaller bites on the screen, often switching back and forth between applications as we do it. A recent study by the British Library of onscreen research activities found that “new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.” No doubt there are costs associated with a switch from the deep, linear immersion of novel reading and this new “power browsing.” But we are also reading in a more contextually rich environment…”
If you go back to the original article, they cut all the qualifications and just made it sound like I was endorsing the “power browsing” mode, rather than explicitly saying that it came with costs. Oh well.
As far as the Google/80K-a-year references, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t care about the intellectual benefits because the programmer kids are going to make a lot of money; I’m saying that there’s clearly one big benefit to screen time, which is that it prepares you for the modern workplace in very direct ways. But I went directly into the question of political engagement in the subsequent paragraphs, precisely because I wanted to show that it’s more than just the money… What we are seeing in these kids across the board is that they are just more engaged — on a civic and political level, on a social level, on an entrepreneurial level — than my generation or the generation before that. And that’s exactly what one would have predicted in a media shift from passive consumption to active social participation. So when the NEA says that there’s “no substitute for the personal and intellectual development” provided by reading, I think those trends suggest otherwise.
— Steven Johnson · Feb 14, 12:40 PM · #