The title shows the weakness of the thesis already: "books" equal "reading."
They don't. I'm reading this online.
This link has been bookmarked by 28 people . It was first bookmarked on 19 Dec 2007, by Michel Roland.
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15 Jan 13
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reased.
More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient—capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”—declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen.
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twelfth graders seem to be taking after their elders. Their reading scores fell an average of six points between 1992 and 2005, and the share of proficient twelfth-grade readers dropped from forty per cent to thirty-five per cent. 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 the words of the department’s test-makers.
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13 Jul 10
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05 Feb 09
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neil stephensonGreat article on the history of reading - some implications for digital technology and education
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31 Jan 09
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Add Sticky Note
Twilight of the Books
What will life be like if people stop reading?
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Add Sticky Notecreative literature
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Why are we privileging creative literature? You win the argument if you frame it that way (maybe). Why is it more important to "civilization" than non-fiction?
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Add Sticky NoteMore alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient—capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”—declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen. The Department of Education found that reading skills have improved moderately among fourth and eighth graders in the past decade and a half, with the largest jump occurring just before the No Child Left Behind Act took effect, but twelfth graders seem to be taking after their elders.
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Could this correlate to the academicizing of literary studies that happens in high school turning students off of reading, in efforts to turn them into literature professors?
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Add Sticky NoteTheir reading scores fell an average of six points between 1992 and 2005, and the share of proficient twelfth-grade readers dropped from forty per cent to thirty-five per cent. 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 the words of the department’s test-makers. In 1992, fifty-four per cent of twelfth graders told the Department of Education that they talked about their reading with friends at least once a week. By 2005, only thirty-seven per cent said they did.
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So much depends on how these research questions defined and framed terms like "reading" - did they include websites along with books?
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Add Sticky NoteThe erosion isn’t unique to America. Some of the best data come from the Netherlands, where in 1955 researchers began to ask people to keep diaries of how they spent every fifteen minutes of their leisure time. Time-budget diaries yield richer data than surveys, and people are thought to be less likely to lie about their accomplishments if they have to do it four times an hour. Between 1955 and 1975, the decades when television was being introduced into the Netherlands, reading on weekday evenings and weekends fell from five hours a week to 3.6, while television watching rose from about ten minutes a week to more than ten hours. During the next two decades, reading continued to fall and television watching to rise, though more slowly. By 1995, reading, which had occupied twenty-one per cent of people’s spare time in 1955, accounted for just nine per cent.
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I'm totally with you on the role of television. But television is 20th century. I'm waiting for you to talk about the web.
Clay Shirky's essay of UGC and social surplus in the age of the web, v. the age of TV, is vital here - though absent so far.
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The N.E.A., in its twenty years of data, has found a similar pattern.
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Add Sticky NoteBetween 1982 and 2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined
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Is this "creative literature" again? If so, what are the stats for reading non-fiction? Reading online?
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Add Sticky NoteWe are reading less
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Shouldn't you say "We are reading less CREATIVE LITERATURE as we age?" And isn't that an important distinction?
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books
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Add Sticky NoteIf 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,
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By leaving the web out of the opposition between "books and television," the author places himself squarely in the 1990s.
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Add Sticky Noteaccording to some experimental psychologists, a reader and a viewer even think differently.
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And is "different" bad? If so, you don't show how.
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Add Sticky NoteA reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does;
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Let's at least consider the possibility that TV, in this argument, represents that "creative literature" we call "theater" - I'm not saying necessarily "good" theater, though the quality of programming seems to have improved greatly in the past 20 years.
Are we arguing that it's better to READ Shakespeare than to WATCH him?
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Add Sticky NoteIf the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.
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And if they "aren't foreseeable," then maybe they're in some ways good? Why the hand-wringing without argument to show its necessity?
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Add Sticky Note$25.95
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Maybe this is one reason people don't read. The rich-poor gap makes that price tag too dear for many in the neo-liberal fin de siecle.
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Add Sticky NoteIn ancient Greek, if you knew how to pronounce a word, you knew how to spell it, and you could sound out almost any word you saw, even if you’d never heard it before. Children learned to read and write Greek in about three years, somewhat faster than modern children learn English, whose alphabet is more ambiguous.
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Side note: This really makes me want to resurrect G.B. Shaw's and others' campaign to reform English for pure phonetic faithfulness. What are the pros and cons of this for reading and literacy in school?
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Add Sticky Notetelevision and similar media
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We're still in the 20th c.
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Add Sticky NoteWhereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.
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This is much more relevant when we stop talking about Greek epic, which is dead, and church sermons, which are alive and kicking.
They invite the same sort of authoritarian relation with their oral practices, but instead of focusing on "physical violence," they focus on "spriritual combat" with mythic devils and demons.
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Add Sticky Noteoral mind-set
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Now we're strictly oral: a radio analog, I guess. How is this relevant to TV and the web?
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Add Sticky NoteAt some point, as a child progresses from decoding to fluent reading, the route of signals through her brain shifts. Instead of passing along a “dorsal route” through occipital, temporal, and parietal regions in both hemispheres, reading starts to move along a faster and more efficient “ventral route,” which is confined to the left hemisphere. With the gain in time and the freed-up brainpower, Wolf suggests, a fluent reader is able to integrate more of her own thoughts and feelings into her experience. “The secret at the heart of reading,” Wolf writes, is “the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before.”
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Hm. So reading itself, according to this model, has its share of "multi-tasking." True and obvious, though I've never noticed it consciously.
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Add Sticky Notetelevision and video games
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Like Greenfield, this author is happy to lump TV and video games together in his argument against electronic media, and to conspicuously omit the internet. Again, 20th c.
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television and newer media
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PowerPoint
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remembered
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recalled
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Add Sticky Notewords and moving images
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More slanted framing.
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DVDs and videos
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Add Sticky Notea television in the bedroom lowered the standardized-test scores of third graders
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TVs AND standardized tests. Oh my.
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Add Sticky NoteRazel noted, however, that fifty-five per cent of students were exceeding their optimal viewing time by three hours a day, thereby lowering their academic achievement by roughly one grade level.
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No argument here. TV is a ghetto for thinking and learning.
Let's give those students three hours of reading, watching, blogging, commenting online, and see how their scores change.
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Add Sticky NoteResearchers recently gave Michigan children and teen-agers home computers in exchange for permission to monitor their Internet use. The study found that grades and reading scores rose with the amount of time spent online. Even visits to pornography Web sites improved academic performance.
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Interesting.
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Add Sticky NoteThe Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy.
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WELL HALLELUJAH. Finally, we've reached the present.
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Add Sticky NoteOf course, such synergies may disappear if the Internet continues its YouTube-fuelled evolution away from print and toward television.
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A big and dubious "if."
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Add Sticky Noteremote
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And now we shift back to the "electronics as TV for couch-potatoes with remotes" straw man.
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Add Sticky NoteAnd so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.
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True. But you missed a more interesting point - if this article allowed comments, you might be more aware of it - WE MAY BE MORE LIKELY TO SPEND TIME _WRITING OUR ARGUMENTS AGAINST IDEAS WE DISAGREE WITH_ IN COMMENT THREADS.
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Add Sticky NoteIt is easy to notice inconsistencies in two written accounts placed side by side.
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We can do this even more instantaneously and hyper-productively with the web. Blogs quote multiple sources, analyze them, compare and contrast them, hyperlink to other readings in the new and endless form of "connective reading" (and writing, since we comment on the pages we read now).
Crain completely avoids addressing the internet after his brief nod to it. And that ruins the relevance of his argument.
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Add Sticky NoteSelf-doubt, therefore, becomes less likely. In fact, doubt of any kind is rarer.
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Kill me. You go from a conditional "MAY" to an assertive "THEREFORE."
If your conditional is wrong (and it's definitely too simple), so is your deduction from it. Some intellectual honesty, please!
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Add Sticky NoteWith text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information. The trust that a reader grants to the New York Times, for example, may vary sentence by sentence.
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A strange sentence. If we "trust" the "authority" of the NYTimes, why would we be so skeptical as we read it "sentence by sentence"? And that trust itself, after such betrayals of trust as the Times' delay in reporting Bush's wire-tapping until after the 2004 elections, is nothing we should promote, as Crain seems to do here like the worst of elitist traditionalists.
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Add Sticky NoteA comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome.
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Not on YouTube, or such video-blogging news sites as Talking Points Memo or Crooks and Liars.
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Add Sticky Notethe viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching. Like the peasants studied by Luria, he thinks in terms of situations and story lines rather than abstractions.
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Sigh. Have you not noticed how the web features embedded video clips WITH ACCOMPANYING TEXT? A new form of media experience - Watch, Read, Read Audience Response, Respond Yourself.
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Add Sticky Notetelevision
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Your obsolescence is showing. TV is dying.
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Add Sticky NoteAnd he may have even more trouble than Luria’s 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, may be too distracted to notice it.
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Sigh again. There ARE people "looking back" at the viewer of online media - if that viewer participates in the discussion. Others will reply, or extend the ideas, in comment threads, forums, etc.
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Add Sticky NoteProficient readers are also more likely to vote.
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The Obama campaign and the liberal blogoshpere understood this. They appealed to online readers to mobilize an historic electoral victory. The netroots didn't form around the morning newspapers on their doorsteps. It formed around websites - blogs, video-blogs, social networking sites, more.
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Add Sticky NotePerhaps readers venture so readily outside because what they experience in solitude gives them confidence. Perhaps reading is a prototype of independence.
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Perhaps reading-and-writing 2.0 is the prototype of some blend of independence and inter-dependence. TV is dying. Social surplus is now going into productivity and action, via the web and other electronic devices, as Clay Shirky points out.
Maybe this reality is something we shouldn't expect traditional magazines, now online but still one-way - you can't comment on Crain's article - to grasp.
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23 Mar 08
FruFru FourOneWhat would it be like if people stopped reading?
advertising article book culture education future history library literacy mind paper psychology publishing reading science society statistics Stats to_read trends USA web2.0
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Twilight of the Books What will life be like if people stop reading? by Caleb Crain December 24, 2007 Text Size: Small Text Medium Text Large Text Print E-Mail Feeds A recent study has shown a steep decline in literary reading among schoolchildren. A recent study has shown a steep decline in literary reading among schoolchildren. Keywords “Proust and the Squid”; Wolf Maryanne; “To Read or Not to Read”; National Endowment for the Arts (N.E.A.); Reading; Books; Statistics In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you didn’t read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the rise.
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Twilight of the Books What will life be like if people stop reading? by Caleb Crain December 24, 2007 Text Size: Small Text Medium Text Large Text Print E-Mail Feeds A recent study has shown a steep decline in literary reading among schoolchildren. A recent study has shown a steep decline in literary reading among schoolchildren. Keywords “Proust and the Squid”; Wolf Maryanne; “To Read or Not to Read”; National Endowment for the Arts (N.E.A.); Reading; Books; Statistics In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you didn’t read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the rise.
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20 Dec 07
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19 Dec 07
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Michel Roland
In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were.-
In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were.
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In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. 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, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.”
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In 1970, according to Editor & Publisher International Year Book, there were 62.1 million weekday newspapers in circulation—about 0.3 papers per person. Since 1990, circulation has declined steadily, and in 2006 there were just 52.3 million weekday papers—about 0.17 per person. In January 1994, forty-nine per cent of respondents told the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that they had read a newspaper the day before. In 2006, only forty-three per cent said so, including those who read online.
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The Book Industry Study Group estimates that sales fell from 8.27 books per person in 2001 to 7.93 in 2006. According to the Department of Labor, American households spent an average of a hundred and sixty-three dollars on reading in 1995 and a hundred and twenty-six dollars in 2005
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According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient—capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”—declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen.
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In 1992, fifty-four per cent of twelfth graders told the Department of Education that they talked about their reading with friends at least once a week. By 2005, only thirty-seven per cent said they did.
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Between 1955 and 1975, the decades when television was being introduced into the Netherlands, reading on weekday evenings and weekends fell from five hours a week to 3.6, while television watching rose from about ten minutes a week to more than ten hours. During the next two decades, reading continued to fall and television watching to rise, though more slowly. By 1995, reading, which had occupied twenty-one per cent of people’s spare time in 1955, accounted for just nine per cent.
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By 1995, a Dutch college graduate born after 1969 was likely to spend fewer hours reading each week than a little-educated person born before 1950.
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Between 1982 and 2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined not only in every age group but in every generation—even in those moving from youth into middle age, which is often considered the most fertile time of life for reading. We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago.
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There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but 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, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.”
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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. If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.
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18 Dec 07
Public Stiky Notes
They don't. I'm reading this online.
Clay Shirky's essay of UGC and social surplus in the age of the web, v. the age of TV, is vital here - though absent so far.
Are we arguing that it's better to READ Shakespeare than to WATCH him?
They invite the same sort of authoritarian relation with their oral practices, but instead of focusing on "physical violence," they focus on "spriritual combat" with mythic devils and demons.
Let's give those students three hours of reading, watching, blogging, commenting online, and see how their scores change.
Crain completely avoids addressing the internet after his brief nod to it. And that ruins the relevance of his argument.
If your conditional is wrong (and it's definitely too simple), so is your deduction from it. Some intellectual honesty, please!
Maybe this reality is something we shouldn't expect traditional magazines, now online but still one-way - you can't comment on Crain's article - to grasp.
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