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Does Reading Matter?

By pharrell

The WSJ's Daniel Henninger had a thought piece last week about a new study showing that total recreational reading--books, magazines, newspapers, and online sites--has dwindled to just seven minutes each day. The study, by the National Endowment for the Arts, excluded the countless hours that modern office workers spend slowly going blind from staring at computer screens at work, as well as text-messages and several other forms of communication that might fall within a broad definition of reading. Henninger, under the title Does Reading Matter, asked:

Are we in a post-digital apocalypse for serious reading?

And if so, does it matter?

But Henninger never really answered the question he posed. Instead, he speculated about why pleasure reading has collapsed as a recreational past-time, suggesting that people who spend most of the day reading at work would rather do something else for leisure, and also, that the collapse of a canon of popular modern literature has drained pleasure reading of its ability to serve as a "common conversation" between educated adults. If you can no longer talk about a particular recent book with your coworkers the way you might today talk about a popular movie--a subject for water-cooler conversation as much as a subject of serious conversation--you're more likely to see the movie.

The deeper question, though, remains--does it matter that American read less for pleasure than we did fifty or a hundred years ago? Though I love to read, mostly biographies but a more novels of late, I'm not entirely convinced that it does. Literacy, of course, is essential for the transmission of knowledge, and I wholeheartedly support programs to increase literacy both in schools and among adults. Still, is pure pleasure reading a good per se? It may well stimulate certain kinds of thoughts in a way that other recreation does not; at the very least, the written work has a certain formal structure lacking in many other forms of art. But the plethora of new diversions created in the past few years, from YouTube videos to video games to extreme sports, have opened countless avenues for entertainment, education, and self-expression, and it hard to fault people for spending less time with books than they did in the past. Perhaps a more telling study would be of passive versus active diversions, ones that engage one's brain and create social connections versus those that do not. I'd be worried if the new diversions are dulling our minds and loosening our social bonds, but until I see evidence on that front, I'm not going to be overly troubled by the NEA's findings.

Full post as published by Harrell Blog on December 04, 2007 (boomark / email).